Travel brings about a great opportunity: to visit local bookstores. On a trip to Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Shanghai, my family and I had the privilege of visiting these bookstores: Daikanyama T-Site (my favorite in the world and default recommendation to anyone visiting Tokyo), Ginza Tsutaya, Foreign Language Bookstore in Shanghai, Duoyun Bookstore, Shanghai Book City, eslite spectrum. (There are many others that I noticed—a beautiful Tsutaya outpost tucked under a highway tunnel in Tokyo, for example—that I didn’t have a chance to pop into.)

It’s rewarding to explore and see, first and foremost, many books in Japanese and Chinese. It’s a refreshing reminder that the world is very big. Because I’m not literate in either of those languages (yet!), I am drawn to the foreign book section where these stores organize their inventory of English books. (I’m always glad to remember that what people define as “foreign” depends on where they live.)

Most of the time, there are the usual suspects—bestsellers, very popular books, and classics. Harry Potter is almost always around.

At the same time, I come across a lot of books, and it is absolutely delightful to come across ones that I’d never even heard about before. These bookstores stocked a lot of them. Some of the ones that made an impression on me include: 

• Boardshorts by Yusuke Hanai—a hardcover collection of one-frame comic illustrations about surf culture. An absolute delight, I have a soft spot for one-frame comics
• The Insomnia Diaries by Miranda Levy—I experience fragmented sleep quite often
• The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey—also about insomnia
• Browse by Henry Hitchings—a collection of love letters to bookshops. I am so grateful to the people who sell books (and I did find Shopkeeping by Peter Miller at McNally Jackson)
• Stet: An Editor’s Life by Diana Athill—a memoir about editing (This one is popular)

I felt grateful to come across these because they were extremely relevant to me. I also wondered why I didn’t come across them earlier—on the Internet, or at the many bookstores in New York City. 

I don’t have a good answer here yet, but perhaps it’s just a matter of probability and luck. The bookstores I visited in Asia were vast, and so had bigger collections, and the buyers may have different criteria for selecting their foreign books. (The only really rare book was Boardshorts.)

It was also a great moment to consider, “How do you decide what’s worth reading?” While I try to read mostly for pleasure, there is often an undercurrent of transaction. I want to read something that energizes me, widens my perspective, or builds upon something that I already knew. Perhaps it’s related to a topic I’m writing about. I’m okay with this—although I could allow for more spontaneity in this process. Some thoughts:

• I had no expectations when I visited these bookstores in Asia, so my mind was very open and it was a delight to find these interesting books. I also had loose time constraints, and the lighting was good in these bookstores, so I could properly sample them. 
• Widening your worldview, in order to better understand yourself, is a good criteria for choosing a book. It feels important to me: if the same people choose what you read, and it’s always the same popular books, then you will be able to relate to that group of people better—at the cost of not exploring or knowing about other people and other groups. Every group of books come from a lineage, and it’s nice to get familiar with as many lineages as possible. 
• Books are material items that hold the potential to help you find answers to the bigger questions in life. What are you doing here floating around the sun? Why do you do what you do? Who are you?

When you read like this, the number of books you read (and re-read!) will take care of itself. Instead, you can focus on the qualities of books that last: 

How do they challenge you? 

What did you learn? 

How did they change your mind—or at least make you reconsider an assumption or belief that you had held onto tightly (perhaps mindlessly)?

P.S., Earlier in my career, I worked at Lifehacker and wrote about reading a lot! Here are some articles on how to make reading more fun, deciding when to give up on a book, the case for re-reading old books, better retaining what you learn from books, and the best places to find books at bargain prices.