Guilty Pleasures in Paperback

I love books. I haven’t always. In fact I used to cheat at reading when I was at school and read about one page in every four so that my bookmark got to the end of the book quicker. Not only did it mean I got onto the Hitchhiker’s guide by 10, I think the skill of being able to second-guess the plot all the time did wonders for my reading comprehension. I did a similar thing in maths, using a calculator-watch hidden in a drawer to get through the early books quicker, and I got A-levels in both subjects with plenty of A’s so there’s an educational model for you.

The thing is, I hate buying books on the internet because it makes me feel guilty. I worked in a Blackwells Medical for a while, and so I’ve seen the way internet outlets are killing-off real bookshops to the point where people in a few years will only buy books they know and will never browse. Sure I’ll read Kurt Vonnegut’s A man without a Country (A Memoir of Life in George W. Bush’s America), but I’ll feel guilty that I bought it cheap online.

I miss the bookshops in the US where you can wander in at midnight, grab a coffee and start flicking through books. Why cant we have that over here? Oh yeah, probably because people these days seem to buy books cheap online…