I was surprised and puzzled when Amazon announced it would open a number of traditional bookshops.   Having just visited one of the stores (in Lynnfield, MA), I’m no less puzzled.

Pretty much from the day it sold its first book online in 1995, Amazon.com has been the reliable bogeyman of the book industry.  Publishers admire its success grudgingly and reluctantly, but they also fear Amazon’s overwhelming dominance of the online bookselling market and the negotiating power it gives the company.  Other booksellers tend to have a less nuanced approach to their giant competitor: they simply loathe it.  Ask any independent bookshop owner to identify the greatest threat to their existence and you’ll get the same one-word answer every time: Amazon.

I think my own attitudes to Amazon are fairly typical of those who love books and bookstores, and those attitudes are riddled with inconsistency and hypocrisy.  I love the range it offers.  I like the prices.  Who doesn’t?  But I recognize that every time I buy a book from Amazon.com, I’m contributing to the demise of something I love and cherish: independent bookshops.

The Amazon bookstore in Lynnfield, which I’ve now visited several times, is innovative in one respect.  It makes extensive and very explicit use of the data acquired via Amazon.com about customer buying habits.  One section of the store is devoted to titles with the largest number of online reviews, another to what’s selling online to consumers in Massachusetts.  You get the idea: this is a store constantly reminding you that there’s a much better store somewhere else online.  This isn’t a bookshop promoting reading, authors, or books.  This is a bookshop promoting Amazon.   I don’t think Amazon is fooling anyone.  The Lynnfield store was practically empty on every occasion I visited it.  Unless these stores drive customers to Amazon.com – and you can be sure Amazon will be measuring that very carefully – maybe, just maybe they’re going to fail.  One thing’s for sure.  Local booksellers won’t be shedding any tears.

I wasn’t aware of Sarah Moss’s work until I came across The Tidal Zone when browsing in a bookshop in London.  It’s an impressive, well-received novel that’s likely to tug at the heart strings of any parent.  Adam Goldschmidt lives in a town in the Midlands of England with his wife, an overworked and stressed family doctor.  Adam, an occasional and very part-time university teacher, is the primary carer for his two daughters, Miriam and Rose.  He does all the things a stay-at-home parent does – cooks the meals, washes the clothes, tidies the house, arranges the birthday parties – while his wife makes the money.  His is a good, solid, secure and predictable middle class life.  Secure and predictable until teenage Miriam collapses at school, her heart temporarily stopped by exercise-induced anaphylaxis.  That’s all I’m prepared to divulge about the plot.  This is a spoiler-free zone.

This is a story about the fragility of daily life, the thinness of the shell that protects our happiness and the suddenness with which that shell can be cracked.  It’s also an intensely English, state-of-the-nation novel, a sharp satire on everything from the National Health Service to gender politics.  Although by no means perfect, The Tidal Zone portrays family life acutely and brilliantly: its joys and terrors, its compromises and treasures.

Even the most ardent of city lovers sometimes needs a little peace and quiet, a place to reflect, or just a sanctuary from other people.  Parks can be good, but nothing beats churches and chapels.  It always surprises me that they’re so empty.  Perhaps people feel they’ll be obliged to pray when they enter, or could be accosted by some crazed evangelical minister determined to convert the innocent passer-by in need of a moment’s silence.  No matter.  The emptier the better in my view.

In Helsinki, residents and visitors looking to sit in silence have two very lovely havens, both of which I visited recently.  The first is Kamppi Chapel (pictured below) which opened in 2012.  I love the fact that the chapel is administered jointly by the city’s parishes and Helsinki’s Social Services Department.  It’s an extraordinary building.  Simple and beautiful, it resembles a huge wooden boat that washed up in one of the city’s busiest shopping areas.  It seems hardly possible that it has been open only five years.  It communicates that thing you find in ancient churches, the feeling that it has trapped within its walls the silence and sense of calm which its visitors are longing to absorb.

The second chapel I visited was Temppeliaukio Church, known to everyone (probably because Finnish is so hard to pronounce) as the Rock Church.  Excavated into solid rock and topped with a bronze dome, it was opened in 1969.  It has more of the trappings of a conventional church that Kamppi Chapel – altar, pews, organ, and so on – and is more explicitly Christian.  Bathed in light and the warm colors of the granite and wood, it’s a perfect place to sit for a few minutes.

A bookshop can become a favorite in an instant.  That’s all it takes – a fleeting moment and the perfect combination of circumstances.  Perhaps it’s lovely weather, a pretty setting, helpful staff, a chance discovery of a great book, even a memorable cup of tea.  When all the ingredients blend perfectly, you have it: that unforgettable place that immediately joins the list of your favorites.

All those ingredients came together recently on a sunny, warm afternoon in a quiet street in Athens, not far from the Acropolis.  I was doing what I like to do – wandering around, but not quite aimlessly.  I knew I wanted a place where I could sit, sip some tea, and watch the world go by.  A friend had recommended Little Tree some days previously, so it was a pleasure to stumble across it during my walk.  It had exactly what I wanted: a quiet patio, shaded by trees, where I could sit with a bunch of young Athenians enjoying coffee and tea.  I couldn’t resist the tea called Soul Euphoria (a combination of apple, chamomile, pineapple, hibiscus, and other ingredients I’ve now forgotten) and a slice of the best homemade lemon tart I’ve ever eaten.

Did I mention this was a bookshop?  Little Tree is, quite rightly, for the locals, and stocks  mostly Greek-language titles.  I found a couple of shelves of English books, mostly translations of classic Greek writers such as Giorgos Seferis.  It didn’t matter.  Great bookshops are about more than books.

It’s hard to understand sometimes why particular neighborhoods become fashionable quite suddenly.  I might have predicted the renaissance of Bermondsey.  After all, it’s very central, close to the Thames, and has good transport links.  Its regeneration was overdue and, once the White Cube gallery opened on Bermondsey Street, unstoppable.  Exmouth Market’s emergence as a “go-to destination” is a little tougher to explain.  Although the area has a rich history and some good 19th century buildings (notably the Holy Redeemer Church), it wasn’t on anyone’s must-visit list until a few years ago.  It was, let’s be honest, scruffy and uninteresting.

Not any more.  For the past few years Exmouth Market has been a magnet for young Londoners, especially those looking for great food, bars, and cafés.  Moro, the internationally renowned Spanish restaurant, was a big part of that first push twenty years ago, and it continue to draw huge crowds.  Just as good, in my opinion, is its sister restaurant, Morito, which serves amazing, authentic tapas and which I visited recently for the first time.  Following Moro’s lead, scores of other restaurants and cafés have moved in, offering a huge variety of food and drink.  On a warm, sunny evening, the area has a wonderful atmosphere.  If you don’t know Clerkenwell and Exmouth Market, don’t miss them on your next trip to London.

Have you ever watched a great illusionist very closely and tried to spot the single moment, that split second, that explains how the magic trick happened? That’s how I feel when I read Haruki Murakami.  I can’t count the number of occasions that I’ve read and re-read one of his paragraphs, sometimes a single sentence, trying to identify how he does it.  How he creates such memorable, affecting stories from such simple words.  How he conjures up the strange, yet instantly recognizable world of “Murakami Man”.

The latest collection by Haruki Murakami has seven short stories, all focusing on a single theme: men remembering women from their past.  In one story, Drive My Car, a successful actor describes to his chauffeuse his meetings with his dead wife’s lover.  In another and, in my view, the best story in the collection (An Independent Organ), a philandering plastic surgeon recalls for an acquaintance the experience of falling in love.  In Kino, a bar owner describes a single encounter with a woman customer that changed his life.   The stories stand alone but the thread connecting them all is the narrator/protagonist: the slightly cold, detached, ironic, troubled men who seem capable of deep feeling only when looking back at events long past and remembering the women no longer in their lives.

Those who pounce on his books the moment they’re published – I’m one of them – will be delighted by this new collection, even though (perhaps because?) there is much that’s so familiar.  The tales and their settings may change slightly from story to story, from novel to novel, but the strange, distinctive, unforgettable voice of Murakami persists and it’s a voice like no other in contemporary fiction.

Should horror seem more horrifying just because it happens in a place you know well?

I woke this morning in London to reports of yet more violence in the city, of attacks targeted once again at innocent people.  The victims this time were on London Bridge and in Borough Market, places I know very well.  At least some of the dead and injured were in a pub in which I sat with my family last summer as we enjoyed a day on the South Bank and in nearby Bermondsey.  I remember so vividly the thousands of people thronging the food market that day, tourists and locals alike enjoying one of the most colorful and vibrant areas in the city, a place that’s so much a part of the amazing renaissance of London in recent years, a re-birth that’s embraced neighborhoods previously neglected, like Bermondsey and Borough.

It’s impossible to shift from my imagination this morning images of what happened last night in a place I know so well.  Familiarity provokes immediacy and that feels especially true with events as horrific as those last night in London.

I grew up a short walk from Regent’s Park.  For much of my childhood it was simply the place I went with friends to play football, and I don’t suppose I gave much thought to how lucky I was to have nearly 500 acres of green space on my doorstep.  I knew nothing of its long history and paid no attention to its many features.  It had grass, lots of grass, and that’s all I wanted.

I strolled through the park recently on a warm, sunny morning, simply using it as a short cut from Camden Town to Marylebone.  I hadn’t been there for many years and had forgotten how lovely it is.  It’s a place stuffed full of treasures: rose gardens, historical monuments, an open air theater, and, of course, London Zoo.  It has one of my favorite fountains, endowed by “a wealthy Parsee gentleman of Bombay as a token of gratitude to the people of England for the protection enjoyed by him and his Parsee fellow countrymen under the British rule in India”.  Best of all, Regent’s Park, in spite of its size, feels like a community park, a place to be enjoyed by Londoners, with none of the “keep off the grass” nonsense you see elsewhere.  And it still has hundreds of kids playing football.

Eddy Bellegueule grew up in a small village in northern France in the 1990s.  There was no belle vie for Eddy, no French rural idyll.  Raised in poverty and surrounded by violence and ignorance, his upbringing couldn’t have been further from the France of the popular imagination.  A tough upbringing was made immeasurably harder by the classmates who bullied and tortured him – without mercy or respite – for being gay.

A thinly fictionalized account of his childhood, The End of Eddy was a sensation when it was published in France in 2014, selling more than 300,000 copies and making a literary celebrity of the 21 year-old author who was once Eddy Bellegueule but is now Édouard Louis.  It’s not immediately obvious why.  It’s certainly not the quality of the writing, which – at least in the English translation I read – is workmanlike.  Perhaps what lies at the heart of the book’s extraordinary success is our love for stories of survival and redemption, our delight at seeing beauty flower in the most terrible conditions and against such adversity.  Eddy’s end would have been unbearable if it hadn’t marked the beginning of Édouard.

The recent presidential elections in France have helped to highlight the rise of fascist parties and the disillusionment among the poor and hopeless that feeds them.  The End of Eddy is more than a “misery memoir”; it illuminates places blighted by recession, lives untouched by the prosperity enjoyed elsewhere, and communities entirely marginalized and forgotten.

The picture books I used to read with my children were long ago packed away in boxes and consigned to the attic.  In a home filled with books, some of the best-loved stories – of bears and gorillas, adventures on the moon and in faraway lands – are no longer on view.  Even so, with a little effort, it’s easy to remember them, the books that taught my kids to read, dream, and imagine.

It’s been a long time since I read a picture book, but I recently won an assortment of books in a fundraising raffle that included Peter Sís’s The Wall.  It’s a wonderful book and worthy of the many prizes it received, but by no means is it a book exclusively for kids.  It tells the story of the author’s upbringing behind the Iron Curtain, in post-war Czechoslovakia, and recounts what it was like to live during the Prague Spring before the Soviet tanks rolled in, crushing everything in their path in 1968.  Through a series of intricate drawings, predominantly grey to emphasize the colorlessness of life under a totalitarian regime, Sís conveys brilliantly the constraints, the monotony, and the miserable uniformity, lightened only by occasional glimpses of the symbols of Western freedom: blue jeans, The Beatles, and The Beach Boys.