I detest shopping. At Target I’m the guy in the pet food aisle who looks like he’s just had a root canal. But when I go on vacation and bookstores are involved, I turn into Shopzilla. If you know what’s good for ya’, don’t stand between me and the last copy of that hiking guidebook to the North Korea borderlands.

In my last bookstore tourism blog, I was on sunny Maui. Since then, my blogging comrade Greg Weekes pointed you to a couple of great bookshops in D.C.

This time I’ll take you to itinerary-worthy independent stores in Portland, San Francisco and my home turf of Los Angeles.

Portland, Oregon

Taking up an entire city block in downtown Portland, the behemoth Powell’s City of Books bills itself as the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world. A tourist attraction in its own right, the store even has its own stop on the city’s public transit system, TriMet. After navigating the sidewalk gauntlet of Portland’s finest pan handlers, step inside and grab one of the free store maps; you’re going to need it.

Powell’s opened in 1971 and has three floors packed top-to-bottom with more than a million books (on the shelves, new and used books sit side-by-side). On the third level, I slide into the Rare Book Room, a plush, scholarly-looking space filled with antique bookcases, desks, chairs and some 9,000 rare tomes.

I’d love to take home that 1814 edition of Lewis & Clark’s Expedition ($350,000), but alas the store doesn’t accept personal checks post-dated for the end of time.

If you’re like me and are crazy for film and music books, you’ll spend an eternity on Level 3, where I browse titles covering everything from Fellini movies to 1950s rockabilly. Cruising the massive selection of art and architecture books, another hour flies by.

At my local Barnes & Noble, I typically skip the travel section (I read and write this stuff almost daily). But on a trip I’m always on the prowl for small press guidebooks to local hiking, cheap eats, photography, you name it.

Powell’s Travel section (Level 2) does not disappoint. My girlfriend, clutching a tattered paperback titled The Lovers’ I-Ching, rejoins me and reports that the Metaphysics section (or as I call it, the “woo woo” aisle) is top rate.        

Back on the ground floor, I browse Mystery books and then hit Sports. Looking around, I notice that here among the Muhammad Ali and Sandy Koufax biographies, there’s not a single pea coat-and-knitted-scarf hipster in sight.

Their lit snobbery tends to annoy me, but these are the Portlanders who make this place great. They turn out for the almost daily slate of author readings and book signings. They linger in the on-site café, sipping lattes and devouring McSweeneys. They love books. They love Powell’s indie spirit. And so do I.

San Francisco, California

Golden Gate Park and Alcatraz are fine and dandy, but when I’m in the Bay Area the top of my must-do list always reads like this: Spend half the day at City Lights Bookstore; buy poetry book; spend rest of day reading it over strong drinks at Vesuvio (the historic bar next door), or better yet, Cafe Tosca across the street.

In the 1950s the North Beach neighborhood was the epicenter of the Beat Generation—those would be the “beatniks” of bongo drums, coffeehouses, be-bop jazz, Benzedrine and a new kind of weird, wild literature. Opened in 1953 by Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, City Lights (named after the Charlie Chaplin film) quickly became a magnet for San Francisco’s “angel headed hipsters.” 

This is where Jack Kerouac hung out, where Allen Ginsberg’s banned-for-obscenity Howl and Other Poems (published by City Lights) was first sold, where Charles Bukowski gave infamous, booze-fueled readings of his working class madman poetry. All this and much more went down at the corner of Columbus Avenue and Broadway.

From the always-busy intersection at the nexus of North Beach and Chinatown, the sidewalk slopes down toward the front door. The building itself, a triangular, Classical Revival beauty built in 1907, is bounded on one side by the colorful murals and sidewalk-engraved poems of Jack Kerouac Alley.

By day, sunlight streams into the store’s Main Floor. A mix of tourists and local bohemians flip through all sorts of titles—from alt literature to thoughtfully chosen mainstream books. It’d be easy for a place with this much history to rest on its laurels and be a stuck-in-the-past Beatnik Hall of Fame. And though you can always count on City Lights to carry a dozen paperback copies of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, decades later the store still feels cutting edge.

Climbing the creaky back staircase, its walls lined with framed book posters and black-and-white 8-by-10s of everyone from William Burroughs to Bob Dylan hangin’ round the store, I arrive in the Poetry Room. Skimming a volume of Baudelaire poems, I hear firecrackers snap crackle and pop pop pop outside the window at a Chinatown street festival below.

To this soundtrack, in my dreadful French accent, I dramatically read “Evening Harmony” aloud to my girlfriend. She’s trying to hide, pretending she doesn’t know me.   

Downstairs, I settle on my purchase: San Francisco Stories, an excellent paperback anthology of essays about the city penned by everyone from Mark Twain to the late great San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Herb Caen. In the basement room, home to aisles of books on music, movies, philosophy, religion, history and politics, an entire afternoon goes by. Fisherman’s Wharf? Maybe next time.

Los Angeles, California

SoCal book freaks know some phenomenal independent stores inhabit L.A. Among the cream of the crop are West Hollywood’s wonderful Book Soup; Pasadena’s gargantuan Vroman’s (opened in 1894); Santa Monica’s haven for art, architecture and design geeks, Hennessey + Ingalls; and my personal favorite, East Hollywood’s funky Skylight Books—complete with requisite bookstore cat and a Middle Earth-worthy tree growing in the middle of the store.

That said, this is Tinseltown, and if you seek movie books, scripts, posters and memorabilia, my go-to spot is Larry Edmunds Bookshop. Rubbing shoulders with Hollywood Boulevard’s tattoo parlors, cheesy souvenir shops and trashy lingerie boutiques, the store is a throwback to my 1970s childhood.

On Saturdays my book-crazed father would pile the family into the Datsun B210, not for a day at the beach or Disneyland, but to go bookstore hopping on Hollywood Boulevard (see why I’m this way?). All the old shops have closed (thanks, eBay), and now Larry Edmunds goes it alone like Gary Cooper in “High Noon.”

The shop packs an incredible amount of inventory into a relatively small space. There are some 20,000 new and used film and theater books. Collectible movie posters and lobby cards abound. I’m coveting an original poster for “Chinatown,” but at $500 it’s way out of my price range.

Perusing the shelves, I flip through The Films of Clint Eastwood, a long out-of-print Marlon Brando biography, The Art of Star Wars and a great book on “Our Gang,” a.k.a. “The Little Rascals.”

Movie scripts, yellowing paperbacks covering the silent era and glossy coffee table tomes on the latest CGI blockbusters? They’re here. So are loads of back issues of American Cinematographer, Cinefantastique and Famous Monsters of Filmland.

This is the kind of place where serendipity often turns you on to something you weren’t looking for. My buy is The Warner Bros. Story, a hefty hardback history of the studio and comprehensive round-up of its classic flicks—from “Mildred Pierce” to the bloody Western masterpiece “The Wild Bunch.”

Hardcore cinephiles come for the store’s mindboggling stock of 500,000-plus movie photos. If you’re searching for an original 8-by-10 publicity still of Liz Taylor as “Cleopatra,” this is the place.

Walking out the door, a teenager rushes past me and asks the counter clerk, “You got any pictures of Lil’ Bow Wow?!” He says, “Nope. No shots of Bow Wow. Sorry, kid.”

Well, I guess Larry Edmunds doesn’t carry everything. But it does have a tangible sense of Hollywood history you won’t get shopping on Amazon.