Kim's Neighborhood

I enjoy walking into a bookshop in which the entrance is crowned with colorful book jackets that lure you as if into a cave that demands exploration, and despite the knowledge that you will be trapped for an hour or more and emerge with less cash in your pockets, but dozens of sparkling ideas in your mind. You keep going, and you are grateful. We have such shop on a corner of West Main Street in Mystic, Connecticut. It’s called Bank Books and, glory be! is open every night of the week, including Sundays, till eight o’clock—a fact, I guess, well known to  Christianity Today’s  Editor in Chief (Russell Moore), who in his end-of-year issue shares some neat observations on the place books now occupy in our daily lives. Books, he says, books invite us to ask questions, ponder, and even change our minds. Some people wonder, he writes, whether books really matter in an image-driven social media age, though the CT staff believe they matter more than ever. “The nation, Moore observes, ...