I walked into a bookshop in the university town of Coimbra last weekend and felt really pleased for about thirty seconds as I looked along the shelves…
I so, so want to enjoy being in a bookshop and feel that they are worthwhile and a book-buying renaissance is forthcoming…
Books – and bookshops – are so lovely and so worth having…so much a part of who I am…
And yet:
Here is a daring truth to admit: I have not bought a book from a book shop for… What?… Six – maybe seven – years or more! Tell me, why would I? What would I buy? Jamie’s ‘One Hundred Recipes in Zero Minutes’; JK Rowling…some kind of moribund thriller about somebody being tortured and executed by a psychopath for no good reason other than my supposed amusement; a political memoir…doh!
Where is the fiction..!
I have been in my local Waterstones twice in the same amount of years – to buy calendars as Christmas presents…and that’s all.
One look in the window is enough to turn me off…
Really, very, very sad (to quote an orange-faced American president…)
So sad.
Bring me books I want to buy…
Publish books I want to read…
