It has recently been suggested that Amazon has surrendered in its war on booksellers. As the number of independent bookshops in the UK has risen, Amazon, known for its aggressive discounting, has increased its prices. I have long relied on Amazon; until 2022 it had been many years since I bought a book anywhere else. But now I don’t think I could buy a book from Amazon – or from any online retailer – again. It is not rising prices that have changed my mind, however, but one real, bricks-and-mortar bookshop.
When I was a child my mother, who worked with dyslexic children, almost gave up on teaching me to read. Every time she sat me down on her lap, trying to show me “kicking k”, I would scream and run away. I only got through the phonetic alphabet because my sister, who was eight at the time, begged her to keep trying, so that I might one day get to enjoy the imaginary worlds she had discovered through children’s books. From then on, summers were spent lying on my back in our dusty attic, running to the bottom of the garden every now and then to check if there were fairies there, as Enid Blyton had suggested there might be. Under my childhood bed there is still a stash of A4 ruled paper with big curly words scrawled across its lines about normal girls who turned out to be princesses, and boys who turned out to be wizards.
But as a teenager words ceased to be an easy means of expression. My undiagnosed ADHD seemed to bleed into more parts of my brain as I went through secondary school, and a page could no longer contain my fizzy and fidgeting mind. A teenage rebel without a cause, I decided that in protest at what I perceived as the strictness of my parents, I shouldn’t sit at home and read, because it was the kind of thing a stereotypical Asian teenager would do. At school I hated how Shakespeare, with his circuitous turns of phrase, was foisted upon us as the overlord of the English literary canon. When my English teacher heard me say as much, I was told that such heresy ruled me out of doing English A-Level.
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