Whenever life gets heavy, I do this one thing and feel instantly lighter

August 30, 2026 — 3:00am

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

I love a bookstore discount table. I love the randomness of it. A sports star’s memoir sitting next to How to Build a Herb Garden. Waterfalls of the World lying beside a slightly pornographic romance novel that briefly went viral on BookTok before being even more quickly forgotten. I imagine these mismatched genres and titles trying to get along, like bad blind dates set up by the Tinder of underwhelming book sales (Binder?). Awkwardly making small talk and wondering how on earth they ended up together.

Attributing human emotions to inanimate objects might seem odd, but really, it’s deeply entertaining. Picture these lonely books, stuck where they lie – the gardening book desperately trying to find common ground with the celebrity memoir, while the sports star only has eyes for the chick lit.

For me, everything on a discount table has value – they simply haven’t yet found the right person. There’s always one title, laid bare and vulnerable, calling me to give it the home it has always so desperately wanted.

My favourite find was a collection of Joan Didion’s non-fiction with a title that spoke directly to me: I Write to Find Out What I Am Thinking. “That’s it!” I thought. “That is exactly why I........

© WA Today