Booked & Boarded: Melbourne

There is a point every year when Melbourne becomes my favourite city again.

It usually happens sometime in April. The heat finally breaks after months of false promises. The light changes. Plane trees along the city streets begin turning shades of yellow and rust. People emerge in jackets and knitwear they have been waiting all summer to wear. Suddenly the city feels easier to occupy.

I start taking the long way home.

A trip into the city for one thing inevitably becomes three or four. An exhibition leads to lunch. Lunch becomes a walk. A walk turns into an hour spent browsing shelves in a bookstore. Entire afternoons disappear without accomplishing very much at all.

This is one of the reasons I love Melbourne. The city rewards curiosity.

Not in the dramatic way that Paris or Hong Kong might. There are no grand revelations waiting around corners. Instead, Melbourne reveals itself through accumulation. Through habits, routines, and small discoveries that become part of your life almost without noticing.

One autumn afternoon begins, as many good afternoons do, at Pellegrini’s.

The room feels reassuringly unchanged. The coffee machine hisses in the background. Plates of pasta emerge from the kitchen with remarkable efficiency. Regulars occupy familiar seats. The walls carry decades of stories without ever needing to announce them.

There are trendier places to eat in Melbourne. There are certainly more photogenic ones. Yet Pellegrini’s remains one of the city’s great institutions precisely because it has never seemed interested in reinventing itself.

Sitting there with a bowl of pasta and a notebook on the counter, I find myself watching the city pass beyond the front windows. Trams glide through intersections. Shoppers weave between one another carrying bags and takeaway coffees.

The city is moving quickly. Pellegrini’s isn’t.

One of the pleasures of living in Melbourne is that cultural wandering rarely requires much planning. A gallery visit can occupy an hour. So can a walk through the arcades or a slow circuit around the State Library. The city is filled with places that invite browsing rather than consuming.

I have always thought bookstores belong in that category.

I rarely enter one because I need a book. More often, I enter for the same reason I might visit an exhibition. I want to see what conversations are taking place. What ideas people are excited about. Which writers are finding readers.

That curiosity eventually leads me upstairs to The Paperback Bookshop.

Every city has bookstores. Only a handful become woven into the identity of the place itself. Paperback is one of them. Almost hidden at the top end of Bourke Street, it occupies a space that feels slightly detached from the city below. The shelves are crowded, recommendations are tucked between titles, and every visit seems to uncover a book I had no intention of finding.

When Dua Lipa recently named it among her favourite bookstores, Melbourne readers responded with a mixture of excitement and quiet satisfaction. It felt less like a discovery than a confirmation. Paperback has long been one of those places readers recommend to one another in lowered voices, as though sharing a secret despite the fact that everybody already knows it.

From there, the afternoon drifts north.

I stop at Ramona, where browsing often feels less like shopping than attending a carefully curated exhibition. Every shelf suggests a point of view. Every display introduces a writer I haven’t yet encountered. To chat with Katie is to come away with a dozen or more recommendations, to the dismay of my TBR. 

Bookstores are often discussed as retail spaces. In Melbourne, they feel closer to cultural institutions.

People move through them in the same way they move through galleries or museums. Not necessarily to acquire something, but to spend time with ideas.

As afternoon turns towards evening, the city begins shifting once again. The golden light that arrives in autumn catches the upper floors of Victorian terraces. Café windows glow a little brighter. Trams fill with commuters making their way home.

I find myself walking without much purpose, something Melbourne has always encouraged. There is comfort in following a familiar route through neighbourhoods that reveal new details every time. A mural I hadn’t noticed. A café opening where another recently closed. A bookshop display that sends me back inside for one last browse.

By the time I board a tram home, my bag is usually heavier than it was at the start of the day.

Not always because of books.

Sometimes because of notebooks. Sometimes because of exhibition catalogues or magazines. Sometimes because an afternoon spent wandering has accumulated its own weight.

For all the places I have travelled, Melbourne remains the city most closely tied to my reading life. Not just because it contains extraordinary bookstores, not because it celebrates literature, although it certainly does both. Books feel embedded in the rhythm of the city itself.

An autumn afternoon here rarely unfolds according to plan. It moves between cafés, galleries, bookstores, conversations, and long walks through familiar streets. The destinations matter less than the curiosity that connects them.

Perhaps that is why I always look forward to autumn. The season reminds me that Melbourne’s greatest pleasures have never been its landmarks. They are its rituals.