I Miss Bookstore Browsing

I’ve written before about how I like to spend my free time browsing through a bookstore.  I can spend an entire day looking over books, reading a few chapters of several, and deciding which ones are worth the investment to bring home.  Such a day gives me peace in the storm of the world.

Unfortunately, the pandemic has brought that peace to a screeching halt.

I don’t want to get into a COVID-19 debate.  I’m not here to talk about its effects, or what people should be wearing.  All I’m doing in this space is acknowledging its impacts on society, and those impacts include bookstores, which are mostly shuttered to browsers right now.  I don’t know of a single bookstore in the area I’m in that is open to the general public.  Even libraries only allow a few people in, and only for a limited amount of time.  So I can’t indulge in just meandering lazily through the aisles on a sleepy Saturday.  And I miss it.  A lot.

I will be so glad when this mess ends so I can get back into my pastime(assuming any bookstores remain open to browse).  Yes, I know I can look on Amazon or some other website for books, but it’s not the same.  For starters, it’s hard to find that rare jewel on Amazon that you can find while looking at a shelf.  Additionally, since I enjoy the physical feel of a book over ebooks, I can’t pick something up from Amazon and flip through it for an hour deciding if it’s worth buying.

So I feel a little lost in the current pandemic.  Some people want to go back to bars, some people want to go back to ballgames – I want to go back to bookstores.  Yes, I’m a total dork, but I’m fine with that.