Books Because...

I was visiting my good friends in Paris this weekend. They own the bookstore Shakespeare and Company. People in a long line around the block, waiting to get in, speaks volumes about the power of books. Inside, you can get advice if you want it, the staff love books as much as their customers do, but what people really enjoy is the anti-algorithm of the place. Let your own inclination make the connections. And if you don’t have any money to spend, you can sit upstairs in the library and read whatever you find there.

`My friend inherited the business from her father, George Whitman, an American in Paris, arriving as a soldier, realising he had found his forever home. For a while, George was selling books from a barge, saving money to get a building. In the late 1950’s, Sylvia Beach, the original owner of Shakespeare and Company, told George he could take over the name for his new store by Notre Dame. In return, and much later, when George was 67, and a father for the first time, he named his baby daughter, Sylvia.

In those days, the store was open midday till midnight. If you needed a place to sleep, you only had to ask, providing you were prepared to do some work, read one book a day, and sleep at night among the books.

I can testify to the effect of sleeping among books. When I was growing up, books were forbidden at home, unless they were religious books, or the Bible. I read all I could in the library, and used the money from my evening job after school to buy books of my own, hiding them under my mattress. This worked well until my enthusiasm meant that I was sleeping closer to the ceiling than to the floor. Mrs Winterson noticed that her daughter’s bed was rising visibly. One night, when I was asleep, she tugged the corner of a paperback. It was DH Lawrence; Women in Love.

That was enough to trigger a frenzy of destruction. Mrs Winterson began pulling books out from under me, toppling me to the carpet, flinging the contraband out of the window, and into the back yard. When she had them all, she marched outside, poured paraffin over them, and set them on fire.

I can never forget it. That cold saturnine night. The flames against the wall.

In the morning I poked around in the ashes, finding fragments of text, like an archeologist. I collected some of these as reminders - reminders of what is quietly real, I think, against her performative distractions.

Those charred jigsaw pieces in my hands, I realised that the sense mattered much less to me than the talismanic power of the words, now freed from their context. I still had the words. The words could be burnt but not destroyed. I had lost a lot but something else was now clear.

Fuck it, I thought. I can write my own.

When I visit Shakespeare and Company, I free-float among the books. The spirit of the place remains unchanged, because the spirit of the place is a belief that reading makes us possible in surprising ways. Books are disruptors. Books are questions. I’m not talking about How To Manuals that pretend to give us answers. I’m talking about the noisy row that breaks out in our heads when we have to think past ourselves.

Do I believe this? How is this making me feel? Why am I getting angry? How come I suddenly recognise what I haven’t been able to put into words?

Sometimes, it might be just a chapter, just a page, just an idea, just a character, just a line we can’t forget. The whole book is not the point, but unless we are prepared to read the whole book, we might never find the point - by which I mean the connection to us. And what it is for me may not be what it is for you. Reading isn’t there to make you an identikit of others. To discover yourself involves searching as far and wide as you can. Reading is a big help. There is only so much we can know via direct experience. Reading gives us more time. More lives to live.

I know that many of us, including me, read reviews, or pick up a tip on a book we might enjoy. We order it. That’s fine. But it doesn’t compare to visiting a really good bookstore. Not the huge caverns where we feel overwhelmed, and where the assistants might as well be selling toffees or toilet roll. A bookshop should feel welcoming and exciting. And you should be able to browse it at human scale. I believe such a trip is worth making as often as you can, just to let your mind off the leash. Nothing directed. See what happens.

If you are fed up of advertising and algorithms nudging your behaviour, trying to take control of your brain, a bookstore is a useful antidote. And that’s before you find exactly the book you need to find…

Just breathe. Just be. Just browse

Who knows what happens next?