The Bookish Birthday Bucket List: Places, Moments, and Reading Dreams I’m Still Collecting

There’s something about birthdays that makes me think less about where I am right now, and more about the quieter timeline of where I’ve been heading all along.

Not in a dramatic, everything-is-changing way.

More like a soft noticing — that my reading life has become one of the most consistent threads through everything else. Not something I built with intention, really. Just something that kept growing in the background while I was living everything else.

And somewhere along the way, I started collecting ideas. Not goals exactly. More like moments I want to leave space for.

This is that list.

Not a checklist. Not something I need to finish.

Just a bookish birthday bucket list of places, experiences, and reading moments I still want to live through.

---

☕ Bookstores + literary places I want to experience

Some places already feel connected to books before you even arrive. Like they’ve been waiting for readers longer than they’ve been waiting for tourists.

• Visit a bookstore in every province in Canada (slowly, over time)

• Find a “signature bookstore” in each place I visit

• Visit Shakespeare and Company in Paris

• Trinity College, Dublin — Book of Kells

• Cărturești Carusel, Bucharest

• Hay-on-Wye, Wales

• Hatchards, London

• Strahov Monastery Library, Prague

• Green Gables Heritage Place, PEI

• Juliet’s House, Italy

• Anne Frank House, Netherlands

• Hobbiton, New Zealand

• Munro’s Books, Victoria (revisit)

• Find a bookstore so unexpected that it feels like it appeared instead of being found

---

🌍 Reading in place + landscape experiences

I don’t think I read the same way everywhere. Where I am always changes how the story feels.

• Read at the Arctic Ocean

• Read at the Atlantic Ocean (after already reading at the Pacific I want both sides of that vastness)

• Go to Romance in the Rockies and turn it into a full bookish travel experience

• Read in the Scottish Highlands, where everything feels wide and still at the same time

• Read somewhere coastal where wind, salt air, and sound become part of the reading instead of just background noise

• Read on a long train journey where movement becomes part of the story itself

• Read somewhere so visually alive that I keep pausing just to take it in, not because I’ve stopped reading, but because I want to notice it

---

📍 Discovery + unexpected bookish moments

Some of the best reading moments don’t feel planned at all.

• Find an indie bookstore in a small town I didn’t expect to stop in

• Discover a secondhand bookstore that feels like it already has its own long history

• Read in a place I didn’t originally plan to stay, and end up there longer than expected

• Find a reading spot inside a museum or historic building where reading wasn’t really the point

• Let a local recommendation lead me somewhere bookish I wouldn’t have found on my own

• Have one trip where I don’t plan any bookstores at all, and let every bookish moment happen by accident

---

📖 Book + language + memory experiences

Some books don’t just stay on shelves. They stay tied to where you were when you met them.

• Buy a book in a different language just because I was there and it felt right in the moment

• Choose a book while traveling that I can’t fully read yet, but still keep it tied to that place

• Collect books from different countries that I didn’t choose through familiarity, but through experience

• Own at least one book that is permanently tied to a specific place and moment in my life

• Keep a book from a trip that I never fully read, but still associate entirely with that time and place

---

💭 The part I keep coming back to

I don’t think this is really about ticking things off a list.

It’s more that I like the idea of my reading life continuing to stretch outward — into places, into moments, into versions of myself I haven’t met yet.

Some of these will happen slowly. Some might not happen at all. And some will probably look nothing like how I’m imagining them right now.

But that feels right too.

Because reading has never really been about control for me.

It’s always been about experience.

And this is just me leaving space for more of it.

If anything, this is less of a bucket list… and more of a reminder that my reading life is still becoming something.

And I’m not in a rush to finish it.

If you made your own bookish bucket list, what’s one thing that would absolutely have to be on it?

A bookstore? A library? A place you want to read someday? A tiny oddly specific reading dream?

Honestly, those are usually the best kinds.

May your heart stay warm, your pages stay full, and I’ll meet you in the next chapter.