I met my friend Darryl from Diamond Jacks for lunch last week. Damn, it’s nice to get out of the house. We met in Waterstones in Piccadilly, which, logically speaking, must be one of the biggest bookstores in the country, but how the hell do you find anything?
On one hand, it’s fantastic to be in a store so big that it should answer your very heart’s desire but much like music streaming, there’s so much of it, it’s hard to know where to start unless you know exactly what it is you’re looking for. We holed up mostly in the music section but there was no copy of No One Here Gets Out Alive and no copy of Crazy From The Heat either, so what kind of music section is that? Sure, there were other things but missing the two greatest rock auto/biographies of all time. That’s not good. I even had a plan to pick up some books I was missing out on–because there must be some–but I didn't see a thing that rattled my cage. Shame.
Sometime later, we hit the streets and went to the Atlantis bookstore where again, there are more books than you can shake a stick at. Atlantis is a ‘magic’ bookstore (and not a rabbit in a hat kind of way), so their entire stock is obviously aimed in that direction, and again, despite being willing to part with cash in exchange for literary excitement, I couldn't find one title I absolutely had to go home with.
The common denominator here is me. It’s statistically impossible that two bookstores with thousands of books can fail to serve me up a book of value, so it must be me. This has never happened to me before. I need some kind of book-viagra to pull me out of it but where the hell do you start?
Maybe it’s post-lockdown attention span damage–because I hear that’s a real thing, but I must admit, Lockdown was one of the best times I’ve had in the last decade, so it can’t be that. Maybe it’s that I’ve read so much weird, wonderful, utterly life-changing stuff over the years that I’ve broken my own reader-radar. Or maybe I’ve just become that guy I swore I’d never be who wanders through shops muttering about how things were better in the Head Press catalogue and the back pages of Fangoria.
It’s a weird feeling though, walking out of two brilliant shops with empty hands. And not because I was being picky, or tight, or in a rush. I had the time. I had the money. I had the open mind. What I didn’t have was The Spark. That book-lust, that sense of “I need this in my life right now or I just might die a little bit inside.”
Maybe this is what happens when you start writing more than you’re reading. Maybe the internal library gets so noisy, nothing on the shelf can get a word in edgeways. Or maybe this is just the calm before the next big obsession—the book that finds you when you’re not looking.
Either way, I’ll keep scouring the shelves like some hungry ghost. And one day soon, I’ll spot a spine that whispers hey you, come here…—and all will be well with the world again.
Until then, it’s coffee and conversation and remembering that sometimes, the best stories aren’t in books. Sometimes, they’re sitting across the table from you and asking if you’ve got any new songs on the go.