The Joy of Bookshops

I’ve had a love affair with bookshops for decades now. As a child, I discovered the joys of reading mostly through my local public library, but when I became old enough to have money to spend on books, I took great pleasure in assembling my own collection. And even when I was short of money, I just loved browsing the shelves!

In the days before book blogs and Goodreads, I discovered most of my new books not through reviews or recommendations but by picking up books at random in bookshops, a process I wrote about years ago in a post on lucky dip reading.

Recently, though, I’ve been missing bookshops. Like the rest of the world, I’ve been hampered by Covid-19 in the last couple of years, but on top of that, I’ve been living in non-English-speaking countries for most of the past decade. I don’t speak the local languages well enough to read whole books, and the English-language sections tend to be small and limited. On top of that, I spent five years travelling full-time, so I had to keep my luggage very minimal.

So, by necessity, I’ve been reading a lot of ebooks, even though I don’t enjoy the experience.

Now, though, I’m in Barbados for a few months, and there’s a second-hand bookshop within walking distance—and, even better, I can sell the books back to them for half the purchase price. So if I like them, I’ll take them back to Europe with me, but if not, I don’t have to weigh down my suitcase.

So there was no reason not to stock up: