“This year continues to be one spent mainly touring bookshops and libraries, so it is time spent with the best people. We live in a world of anxiety with a low hum of panic around us, so each act of kindness becomes increasingly powerful. I was recently helping out in The Unexpected Bookshop in Alnwick. Someone came to the counter with an excellent selection of books and I said, ‘Can I recommend one more – Leonard and Hungry Paul – just read the first paragraph and you will know if it is for you.’ Within that paragraph is the sentence, ‘She was a person for whom kindness was a very ordinary thing, who believed that the only acceptable excuse for not having a bird feeder in the back garden was that you had one in the front garden.’ She read it. It was for her. Passing on beauty, delight and compassion is one of the wonders of the library and the bookshop.” “Books are not just a place where people can be given permission to be themselves when they find the voices that reflect their sometimes hidden lives, but they are a place where we can come to understand what is new and strange to us and see that it may be far less strange than we imagined. We do ourselves a great disservice if we demand everyone is moulded into the same shape as us, just as we do by believing we must force ourselves into the shape we believe others expect us to be.”—”Bookshops help us understand humanity’s complexities. Robin Ince finds empathy and understanding as he visits various bookshops round the UK.”