I walked home with it tucked under my arm, this massive Victorian book in this massive Victorian town. And for the rest of the year, whenever I felt low, or just needed to be in a place where the dust itself hinted of adventures, I’d be back at the shop, with its big front windows crammed with (what else?) books and the wonderful smell of dusty old books.

It’s funny, my need for a book I can lose myself in, and the bookstores in which they can be tested, tasted and thumbed-through, because for most of my growing-up years, I wasn’t much of a reader. I preferred comic books, TV and wandering through the wooded hills surrounding my childhood home in Northern Virginia.

In fact, it was wandering — exploring — that I loved the most, and as I got older I went from tramping through the woods, to bicycling into Washington to getting on a train or a plane to go someplace where everything was more thrillingly elegant than it was at home.

I still love to wander, only now I do it, as often as not, through books. Why merely go to Russia, when you can go to 19th-century Russia, which reminds me that it’s probably time I reread “The Brothers Karamazov.”

Last spring, when I was once again joining my husband on his academic adventures, this time in London, I spent many dreamy hours in Waterstones. Books, you say? The Gower Street Waterstones, with its light-drenched reading nooks and cafe, is a castle of books, housed in a fanciful red-brick building of the Franco-Flemish Gothic style. It’s sort of like the Metropolitan Museum of Art — where do you start? — but in this museum you can buy the art.

Speaking of book-museums, if you ever visit Oxford, go to Blackwell’s, though be warned that once inside, it’s hard to escape. With its cavelike layers and endless rooms, its visiting authors and readings, the place keeps sucking you back in. Blackwell’s also has the advantage of being smack in the middle of what’s perhaps the world’s most famous college town: If you get overwhelmed by titles, you can always pop around the corner for tea and crumpets or, perhaps, a lecture on theoretical physics.

Though for all intents and purposes, and with apologies to Cervantes, the English perfected the novel; the art of universally themed and many-chaptered storytelling got an early start in the Middle East when the Jews composed and codified the Hebrew Bible. It should come as no surprise that the original “People of the Book” live in places where there are seemingly as many bookstores as there are falafel stands — and because I go to Israel often to visit family, I’ve gotten to know my way around them.