Are bookshops facing a sad extinction?

All of us who are fiction-lovingly bookish and who natter to bookish others are guilty of having pretended to have read a book we've not read at all or have only skimmed.

And so Simon Evans' piece, from its title, seemed about to attach people like me to a virtual polygraph and to expose our fibbings.

But I needn't have worried. Evans is very mild-mannered and forgiving about the pretence he is discussing, explaining how impossible it is now for even the most bookish of us to read everything.

"Now, over ten trillion new titles hit the shelves every month in Young Adult fiction alone," he gasps.

And he is even forgiving and understanding of our pretence that we have read "classics" like Middlemarch, Vanity Fair and Madame Bovary since alas, he sighs "our literary to-do list grows ever longer as our mortal span contracts".

Until last Sunday I would have been fibbing if I'd said I'd read J.L. Carr's classic novel A Month In The Country but then last Sunday I did read it, all in one day, ensconced at home in my study with my dog.

A temporary physical infirmity kept me off the tennis court and off the Pétanque piste and so a day indoors with an E-book was enforced.

To digress just a little, those of us who have embraced the miracle-witchcraft of the E-book Reader may be gnawed by guilt at what our chosen way of buying and reading books has done to ye olde bookshops.

The digital-book-deepened plight of orthodox bookshops (including and perhaps especially second-hand bookshops) is ruefully discussed by Max Norman in his essay What We Gain from a Good Bookstore that has just popped up in my online New Yorker.

His song of praise to good bookstores, now an endangered species, reminds one of what pulse-quickening joy visits to them used to give.

Quoting from a new book, Marius Kociejowski's memoir, A Factotum in the Book Trade, he notes how Kociejowski hankers for "the chaos ... the mystery" of rambling old bookstores, with their "promise ... that somewhere, in one of their nooks and crannies, there awaits a book that will ever so subtly alter one's existence".

"With every [such] shop that closes," Max Norman laments, "a bit of that life-altering power is lost and the world leaches out more of the serendipity which feeds the human spirit."

Guiltily I confess that, beguiled by the E-book (the effortless ease of buying a book on impulse, receiving it on one's device within five minutes of feeling the desire for it!) I haven't darkened the door of an old-fashioned bookstore for some 10 years.

How one's guilts pile up, over time, like (although this is not one of my best analogies) winter's snowdrifts pressing up against the door of one's log cabin, making it impossible to go out.

One does get the occasional glimpse of the half-forgotten olde book shoppe browsing-shopping experience when one haunts op shops and junk-antique shops.

Your manly columnist is a passionate flower-arranger and so 'tis no wonder that I have what may be one of the largest collections of flower vases and objects that can be used as flower vases in the Southern Hemisphere. The flower arranger can no more have too many vases than a citizen can have too many morals, and so it comes to pass that I am a haunter of op shops and of junk-antique shops, the natural habitats of the pre-loved vase.

Canberra is tragically bereft of junk-antique shops, but they are so essential to that serendipity which feeds the human spirit that when I come to power my government will install one in every suburban shopping centre, massively subsidising it (for such emporiums can never make a profit) at taxpayers' expense.

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My government's model will be just the kind of shop I have just visited in a characterful NSW hamlet (not a million miles from Adelong). The shop epitomised the promise, just discussed above, that among its shadowed nooks and crannies there awaited objects with the power to ever so subtly alter one's existence.

With whoops of bliss I pounced upon some existence-altering vases while also looking longingly at all sorts of things that would never have fitted into our VW Golf.

They included a range of antique stuffed kookaburras (if the shop had a specialty then stuffed Australian fauna of the 1920s seemed to be it) and two flesh-pink full-sized 1950s naked store dummies (one very conspicuously male, the other very conspicuously female) that would have magically enhanced my suburban Canberra garden with its very own Adam and Eve.

But back to my study and to last Sunday when, perhaps prompted by Simon Evans' piece and seized by the need to cease only pretending to have read A Month In The Country and to really, actually read it I had it delivered to my E-book Reader in a magic trice.

It became a beautiful Sunday indoors curled up with my warm and musically-snoring dog and with so beautiful and so exquisitely sad a novel. The novel's melancholy last few pages and then its ending made me cry unmanly tears.

Hearing me my four-legged confidante looked up, but of course one of the reasons a dog is easily a man's best friend (a woman only ever at best coming a distant second) is that the sweet beast, the soul of discretion, can be relied upon to never gossip about a man's private foibles.