Does the algorithm know us better than we know ourselves? I am skeptical. Consider its book recommendations. The algorithm consistently recommends either obvious choices or books I have no interest in whatsoever. One major, ironic exception: when I was writing about the contemplative philosopher Byung-Chul Han, an uncompromising critic of the digital, the algorithm offered up Anne Dufourmantelle’s Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living. I had somehow never heard of Dufourmantelle, the French philosopher and psychoanalyst who died in 2017 while trying to save drowning children in the Mediterranean. Dufourmantelle turned out to be a kindred spirit of Han’s, and a kindred spirit of mine as well. So, score one for the algorithm. But even here, I am tempted to instead see cosmic irony, a God wink.

I still use the ways of yore to find my books: reviews, recommendations from friends, nods from authors in interviews, intriguing quotations that lead me to the original. And, of course, I find books by browsing. I am not much of a shopper, but I can browse a used bookstore for hours. I regularly check the bookshelves of all Goodwills and Habitat ReStores in a fifty-mile radius. I anticipate library book sales. I love the smell of used bookstores, the musty tang of yellowed paperbacks. I resent when bookshop owners cover up this smell with candles or incense. They are using (abusing!) sacral means for sacrilegious ends, in my opinion. My pulse quickens as I enter the shop. What will I find?

I have always felt this way about bookstores. I used to feel the same way about music and movie stores. It is unsurprising, then, that the Canadian poet and critic Jason Guriel had me from the opening line of his 2022 book On Browsing: “There’s something to be said for the Blockbuster Video store of my youth.” In truth, Guriel has many things to say on its behalf. On Browsing offers a lively defense of real-world perusal, especially of books, music, and movies. Guriel goes after the algorithm from the start. He contrasts the endless scrolling through options on streaming sites to the very different experience of browsing V.H.S. tapes or D.V.D.s on wire racks, turning them over to read the review blurbs and synopses, circling back and spotting titles you missed, perhaps asking the bored worker or hip-looking customer if he has seen a particular film or has a recommendation:

The real-world tiles didn’t proactively rearrange themselves in anticipation of your unique wants. In lieu of tailored algorithms, there were a few shelves given over to staff recommendations. These challenged you to ignore the new-release walls, decorated by market forces, and defer to the taste of an authority (or, at least, a part-time employee majoring in film).

The movie you planned to rent might not be there. You might have to choose something else. Perhaps it would be a dud, perhaps an unexpected masterpiece. A film recommended by a friend long ago but never encountered might suddenly appear. One of those staff recommendations might become your new favorite. Or maybe you would find something brilliant that you didn’t even know existed. In short, the Blockbuster offered real discovery, at times even serendipity.

Guriel brings out the drama of the “Age of Browsing” and, by contrast, the flat predictability of the “Age of Scrolling.” The streaming sites offer more options but less drama. And even the former claim is debatable as proliferating streaming services buy up film rights and fence off their back catalogs. And have you noticed how few classic movies are on Netflix? Contrast this with the great rental places of the past, especially the quirky independent ones (how I miss you, Maupin’s Music and Video of Crozet, Virginia).

When it comes to music, Guriel describes an important but neglected phenomenon I recognize from my youth, when I would scrape up cash to buy an album based on a recommendation or a song heard on the radio. By high school, I could preview C.D.s in the store on a headphone station. Napster arrived around the same time. In my typing class, the teacher did not know that we were loading up her new lab’s computers with MP3s until they started to lumber and groan from the file load. Before these developments, if a friend hadn’t played an album for me, I was taking a risk when I bought it. Often enough, the first listen would disappoint. The album’s single turned out to be a made-for-radio outlier. What was my friend Adam thinking when he recommended this band? But since I had dropped the cash, and since I didn’t have the whole world’s music available to me on YouTube and Spotify, I would listen to it again, and again. Sometimes, I never warmed up to an album (I am sorry VAST, I tried), but often enough my musical palette expanded in salutary ways (thank you, King Crimson). “Art,” Guriel reminds us, “has always required second—and third and fourth—chances to saturate the mind.”

Guriel is a poet with a Ph.D. in English, so On Browsing also takes us to libraries and bookstores. Like many a professor, Guriel rues how university libraries have become bustling coffee shops and computer labs on top of dusty, largely abandoned catacombs. Those catacombs are the stacks, of course, where all the shelved books go unread. Only the truly eccentric and weird now venture into these depths, such as the humanities grad students, who know that browsing the shelves around a call number jotted down with one of those stubby library pencils will uncover helpful titles missed by the database search.

As for bookstores, Guriel describes a formative sci-fi discovery of his youth (Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash), and he describes how in later years, having decided to write poetry but uninspired by the “attenuated” Canadian poetry his “profs had been pushing in university,” he happened upon A Lover’s Quarrel, a volume of poetry criticism by Carmine Starnino. A Lover’s Quarrel confirmed Guriel’s assessments of that attenuated stuff, and it introduced him to an alternative tradition of Canadian poetry that wasn’t “as scrubbed of formal texture as a prairie.”

Much of On Browsing is about Guriel’s youth. A Gen X–er, Guriel grew up as a lower-middle-class kid in the Toronto suburbs. He spent a lot of time reading sci-fi novels and comic books, listening to music, and watching movies. He also spent a lot of time being bored:

Virtually no other kids lived on my street; what children there’d been had grown up and moved on, leaving behind senior citizens not quite ready yet to yield their homes to younger families. So, I’d bounce a ball against an outer wall of our bungalow, over and over, and tell myself stories, fodder for comic books I would one day letter and illustrate.

Like Byung-Chul Han, Guriel thinks we lost something important when we started pulling out a smartphone at the first hint of boredom—even worse, when we started putting devices in the hands of restless kids as soon as they utter the b-word. “We scroll to stave off an intolerable state,” claims Guriel. “We scroll to avoid being alone with ourselves. But boredom is a natural condition, the fishbowl medium a mind should be able to swim in.” Deep boredom is good for the imagination. It is good for the soul.

Guriel and his friends occasionally set out on quests to the cool indie music and movie shops in downtown Toronto. Quest is a good word for it. “The lack of smartphones gave daily life a little edge back then,” Guriel remarks. In recent years, Guriel has turned from writing lyric poetry to writing epic sci-fi verse novels in heroic couplets. They are rollicking good fun. They are also good. He has published two of them so far. Here is the back cover description of the first, Forgotten Work, published in 2018: “In the year 2063, on the edge of the Crater formerly known as Montréal, a middle-aged man and his ex’s daughter search for a cult hero: the leader of a short-lived band named after a forgotten work of poetry and known to fans through a forgotten work of music criticism.” Guriel’s youthful quests undoubtedly planted the imaginative seeds for his grown-up verse novel.

Most often, though, Guriel did not browse for books, movies, and music on downtown quests but during his family’s weekly trips to the suburban mall. He recounts, with subtle comic touches, his father’s inexplicable ritual of parking “near a department store entrance. We never entered through the mall proper; we came at the mall obliquely, stealing in through one of its larger tenants, like the Bay or Sears.” Guriel evokes the simple pleasures of being a “teenager armed with a little bit of spending money and the freedom to roam.”

Now, it was once fashionable to decry the mall as a gaudy temple to Mammon—the locus of a secular religion so widespread and fervent that one wonders whether the “secular” should simply be dropped. Fair enough. No one should defend consumerist orgies that fill up sweatshops and landfills while emptying out shoppers’ souls. Malls put many a downtown on life support. But these once-grand temples of shopping are now mostly abandoned or crumbling. The Pennsylvania mall of my youth is a ruin that wouldn’t be out of place in a dystopian novel. The similarly sized mall in Staunton, Virginia, which I drive by regularly, has been demoed—reduced to literal mountains of rubble behind a chain-link fence. This does not mean that we have rejected Mammon, of course. Consumerism—now starkly atomistic—continues apace via smartphone and next-day delivery. Perhaps from this vantage point we can see that the mall not only stoked consumerism. It also contained and tempered it. The mall at least offered human contact, at times even community.

Guriel provides the mall with an elegy and a postmortem defense along these lines. It would be stretching it to say that Guriel does for the mall what Walter Benjamin did for the Parisian arcades, but he is at least up to something similar. Guriel recalls, for instance, a comic shop owner who would “buy” his and his friends’ original comics to “sell” despite never really selling any of them. Guriel and his buddies still took pride in seeing their creations in a store. Undoubtedly, this played some role in encouraging Guriel’s own fledgling writing career. Good on you, comic shop guy. (You might be picturing a golden-hearted Jeff Albertson, the ponytailed nerd looming behind the comic counter in The Simpsons, but Guriel provides us with a striking description of “the pale, long-haired proprietor of the Hairy Tarantula comic shop, who always looked like he’d just descended from some cross to partake of a spliff.”) Guriel shows that, whatever might have been going on in the Gap and American Eagle Outfitters, there was much more than consumerism going on in those music and bookstores. There was the sense that the disc, the book, the movie you just discovered in that dusty discount bin could open up a world. And it really might.

The mall even served as a kind of commons. Some of the most poignant passages in On Browsing are brief recollections of Guriel’s father, a consummate browser who rarely purchased anything. Guriel recalls how he and his father would sometimes spend Sundays just hanging out in the mall parking lot, feeding the seagulls. (“The large, empty parking lot, abutting a highway, was our Scottish Highlands.”)

Guriel’s reflections on the mall made me recall some forgotten details of my own early mall trips. My family’s trips tended to be monthly rather than weekly since the Chambersburg Mall was a solid hour’s drive from our dairy farm. We would leave mid-morning on Saturday, have lunch at Bonanza (the mall buffet my father loved and which, in a happy coincidence, had the same name as one of his favorite television shows), browse for a couple of hours, and then return home in time for the afternoon milking.

From the age of ten or so, when I was allowed to roam the mall on my own, these trips became a kind of covert operation for me. The long car ride gave me time to strategize. I, like Guriel, was a bookish boy with a taste for fantasy and sci-fi. If I wanted to buy a Star Wars or Star Trek novel (or Dune or Children of Dune, but not Dune Messiah, Heretics of Dune, or God Emperor of Dune) I could easily get it past my mom’s purchase inspection. Fantasy, my stronger preference, was trickier business. Like many Baptist mothers of her day, she had been warned of the evils of Dungeons & Dragons, so she was wary of anything with a wizard’s staff on it. That said, if the necromancers didn’t look too evil, and if the elf princesses weren’t too scantily clad, I might not have to return that Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance novel. Often enough, though, I wanted a contraband book, so I had to find various ways to smuggle it back to the farm. My go-to strategy involved sneaking a spare car key from home, buying the book, slipping back out into the parking lot when everyone was preoccupied (my dad often napped in the car after the buffet—so that was a danger), hiding said book under the seat, and heading back into the mall again. I would later repeat the same trick with metal C.D.s. It was riskier still to sneak into the one store from which I was barred by maternal injunction—Sea the Source, which specialized in incense, black lights, lava lamps, hacky sacks, hemp jewelry, music posters, and various items of apparel and décor embossed with marijuana leaves. I was not interested in any of that. I was interested in the roleplaying games in the back. Once, my mother spotted me coming out of the store, and I lost the right to wander the mall on my own for the next two trips. I instead had to accompany her through the aisles of JCPenney and Sears as she shopped. I had to peruse the shelves of Waldenbooks under her watchful eye. Humiliating!

Of course fantasy and metal, those genres of the numinous and sublime, probably kept my religious sense alive for many a year. Or maybe that isn’t ironic at all. I suspect the same is true for many. Here I could point to the novels of George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Madeleine L’Engle. I could point to the Romantics, to Rudolf Otto on the mysterium tremendum, or to Jonathan Geltner’s excellent recent novel of Dungeons & Dragons, fantasy, and faith, Absolute Music. Of course, there were no guarantees. I could have gone New Age–y or started reading Aleister Crowley. I could have become a lifelong basement gamer with no other ambitions. My minor subversions of parental authority could have turned into full-on rebellion. Sue Knepper circa 1995 may have thought my eventual conversion to Catholicism to be only barely better than these alternatives. But whatever role they played in my religious life, I can also say with certainty, and with Guriel, that those fantasy novels enriched my childhood and stretched my imagination. Like generations of writers before me, growing up on a farm inspired me to write and gave me plenty of material. Like many a child of the Nineties and early 2000s, the books and music I browsed at the mall inspired me as well.