It is a cliché among the thoughtful class — the English majors, the publishing house interns, the baristas who write nonfiction essays with law school applications in their desk drawers like a depressing emergency eject button — to say that we found our True Home in a bookstore. It was there, we say, where we understood the world was immensely vaster than the confines of our childhood homes, by which we usually mean the discovery of other kinds of lives, far more interesting than our own; and also sex. But today, I rise in opposition: Get out of the bookstore. Go outside. Go for a run.
When I was a young man, bookstores were more important to me than toy stores, even more than libraries, because anything I saw in a bookstore could be
mine, forever...