Foyles is the one I've heard of.

Too bad you are not going to Hay-on-Wye! I hear the town is known for its bookshops.

Did you read A Little Life too?

I loved Incidents in the life of a slave girl written by herself by Harriet Jacobs

Tend to visit Skoob Books every time I visit London. There are a lot of second-hand books, but also new overstock books that aren't the typical bestsellers. Plenty of bargains.

My husband calls it the "rebound read" every time he catches me reading Memoirs of a Geisha or Jurassic Park. He's not wrong lol

2nd - don't be put off by the crowds in the front part of the shop, just work your way through to the back where they sort books by country rather than genre (which more book shops should do).

Whenever I encounter this, I read one of my rebound books. They snap me out of the blues until I find a new world I'm willing to invest in.

Heywood Hill in Mayfair and Book Bar near Finsbury Park are my two favourites.

Sometimes I try to slow myself from reading because I don't want it to end.

I often never finish a book or a game if I like it too much. It's probably because of the reason you mentioned.

I was reading James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss and watching the first season of HBO’s Perry Mason contemporaneously, and Matthew Rhys just kind of became CW Sughrue in the process. Paul Giamatti was once linked to a film adaptation of the character, if that gives you any indication.

Yeah I've been on AO3. That's not what I'm talking about. I've a few published fan fictions out in the world myself.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a way to log what you're reading on FF sites. Like GoodReads or Storygraph. I know that the sites themselves have ways of marking favorites, leaving reviews, etc... but I want to be able to have a list, make a challenge for myself, things like that. Without having to use a spreadsheet.
This is how I feel about podcasts as well. I keep neglecting podcasts and fan fiction because there's no way to keep track of what I've been through unless I go through a LOT of extra work myself. Whereas on GR or SG it is just a matter of a few clicks to update my progress whenever I finish or DNF or want to review something.

I finished 'The left hand of darkness' last week and I think I'm still stuck in that novel with Genly AI on the planet Gethen.

Have you listen to an audiodrama? Cause those things are like 80% space horror

Came here to suggest this—I love that one!

To me it's like a portal to another world just closed and you'll never see those characters again, like saying goodbye to some good friends. Of course you can reread the book but it's not the same. Going back to that world is no longer possible...

Not a store but if you love books the British Library should be on you list it’s incredible

Yes! This is what I’ve been doing this year. I alternate between a short 70-150 page novella and a bigger book. It’s so refreshing.

Nikolai Nikolaevich and Camouflage: Two Novels, by Yuz Aleshkovsky

Second for Foyles. Although it is these days a fairly standard chain bookstore it is such an important historical building: the literary luncheons that played such a key role in the Bloomsbury set, the queues round the block to buy DH Lawrence before the ban came down etc...

Although it has to be said the thing Foyles was mostly famous for was what an incredibly bad bookshop it was to the 1950s to the 1980s where, under the management of the eccentric Christina Foyle who loathed her staff so much she refused to allow them to handle money, you could only buy a book through an exasperating triple queue system (order, invoice, collect), books were only sorted by publisher and date of publication, and acquisition choices were eccentric in the extreme (making it a great place to stumble across a rare book by accident but a terrible place to find anything you were looking for). It's now much much more normal, but what's the point in that? Would you buy soup from the soup nazi if he was nice now?

I’ve read that tv show finales are often leaving viewers in similar states as breakups. So the same can surely be said for books. You build a relationship to the protagonist and environment and lose all of that in a short time, so it’s understandable.

Yes, it's so weird. It's just a lighthearted recap of the events of the book and why they wouldn't fly in the modern day and everyone's acting like OP is trying to rouse a Twitter mob and cancel LM Montgomery.

Cries in “The Name of the Wind”!

I thought your post was funny OP and I'm not sure why everyone is getting so upset when you are just sharing your observations about the book without trying to cancel or boycott it in any way. It was clearly written in a lighthearted tone and I'm sorry people are missing that. There's a review site called SmartBitchesTrashyBooks, which your style reminds me of. I think you might enjoy it and honestly I would read longer book reviews from you, if that was something you were interested in producing.

While it's unreasonable to expect books from previous time periods to conform to modern social norms, it's as unreasonable IMO to shame modern readers who decide that the book is outdated and even perhaps write a lighthearted post making fun of it.

THIS is what you come to London for. :D