There is a particular kind of book we are very fond of in Chapters. It looks, at first glance, like a guidebook.

Then you start reading it and realise it is actually trying to get you out of the house.

Cassie Stokes’ new Best of Ireland: An Insider Guide to the Real Ireland is a very good example. There are more than 500 recommendations in it, covering all 32 counties: pubs, restaurants, walks, festivals, castles, hotels, hidden corners and places Cassie has discovered during years of travelling around Ireland.

You could, presumably, turn it into an enormous checklist.

Done that. Eaten there. Photographed that. Next.

But that seems to miss the point.

The best books about places give us something more than a list of coordinates. They tell us why somewhere matters. They give us the stories that allow us to see what we are looking at.

And increasingly, I think we need them.

We have never had easier access to information. Within seconds, your phone will tell you the ten best pubs near you, the most Instagrammable walk in Wicklow or the five things you absolutely MUST do in Dublin.

We have become remarkably efficient at finding places.

Knowing them is another matter.

Donal Fallon’s The Dublin Pub: A Social and Cultural History is ostensibly a book about pubs. It is also a history of Dublin told through the rooms in which Dubliners gathered.

Fallon takes us from the taverns and ale houses of earlier centuries through famous pubs, early houses, shebeens and gay bars. Wolfe Tone wanders through the story, as do Nell McCafferty, Con Houlihan and countless ordinary Dubliners. The pub emerges as something far more interesting than somewhere alcohol was sold. It was a meeting place, debating chamber, refuge, workplace, political headquarters and occasionally somewhere to sing very bad karaoke.

That distinction matters.

I don't really drink. Alcohol doesn't particularly like me and, after many years of negotiation, I have accepted the situation.

But I love pubs.

I love the wit of a good local. I love conversations travelling along a counter. I love the person who came in alone somehow becoming involved in a discussion three stools away. I love the sense that the room existed before you arrived and will continue after you leave.

Drinking at home is consuming alcohol.

Going to the pub can be something entirely different.

It is participation.

And pubs are not the only places where we are in danger of confusing the transaction with the experience.

Warren Farrell's So Once Was I: Forgotten Tales from Glasnevin Cemetery does something similar with a place many of us think we know.

More than a million people are buried at Glasnevin. We know the great names. Farrell, who worked there as a tour guide, goes looking for the others: lion tamers, aviators, pioneers, performers, revolutionaries, criminals and people whose extraordinary lives have largely disappeared from public memory.

You can walk through Glasnevin looking at monuments.

Or you can know who is underneath them.

Those are two completely different walks.

Once you know the stories, a landscape stops being scenery. A city stops being buildings. A graveyard stops being stone. People come back into it.

Roz Purcell's The Hike Life books work from another direction. They contain routes, practical information, places to stop and things to see, but the project around them has always contained an important additional idea: get outside, walk and, quite possibly, meet somebody.

The Hike Life community has organised free group hikes specifically giving people the opportunity to get off their phones, get outdoors and meet other people.

That feels increasingly significant.

New research, and I am sorry it is all from the UK, from the Resolution Foundation found that British men aged 18–29 were spending about six and a half waking hours alone each day by 2023, two hours more than a decade earlier. Young women were spending roughly five hours alone, an increase of an hour and a half. The researchers found that work, particularly the growth of working from home, was an important part of the change.

At the same time, Ofcom reports that UK adults now spend an average of four and a half hours online every day on personal devices.

Technology has made many parts of life wonderfully convenient.

It has also made it remarkably easy to live a life in which we don't have to encounter very many people.

Last week I was in the north-west of England, a part of the UK that has always felt slightly like a country in its own right. What surprised me was how many local coffee shops and community pubs I found.

They weren't particularly fancy.

That was rather the point.

They were full.

People knew each other. People stopped. People talked.

It made me think about something else I had been reading. A recent Spectator article looked at the unexpected revival of independent bookshops in Britain. A decade ago their numbers had fallen to just 867. Online retail and ebooks were supposed to be the future and, for a while, it looked as though the physical bookshop might simply be collateral damage.

Instead, independent bookshops began coming back.

Interestingly, part of that revival has involved shops becoming more distinctive and more specialised. Shops built around particular genres, interests or communities have found readers who actively want to gather around them.

That is the word that matters: community.

Perhaps people discovered that buying a book and going to a bookshop aren't actually the same activity.

We know something about this at Chapters.

We can sell books online. We do. We have spent years investing in the systems that allow us to do it properly because convenience matters and sometimes you simply want the book delivered to your door.

But we have also watched people come into Parnell Street for a book and stay for something else.

They come to launches and talks. They play chess. They make friendship bracelets. They sit quietly and read. They get talking to strangers. They disagree about books. They recommend things to one another. Occasionally they come in to escape the rain and emerge several hours later having accidentally attended an event.

When Chapters reopened, we discovered very quickly that people had missed more than somewhere to buy books. Customers told us their stories. We have written about many of them elsewhere, so I won’t go over them again here, but what stayed with me was this: we often talk about books as portals, taking us into other lives, other places and other ways of seeing. What I have come to realise is that bookshops can be portals too. They get us out of our own heads and routines and into the world. Into conversations, encounters, recommendations, arguments, friendships and sometimes whole parts of ourselves we had forgotten were there.

We had all been offered the alternative.

Order online. Stream it. Download it. Work from home. Drink at home. Get dinner delivered. Scroll through photographs of somewhere somebody else visited.

Some of those things are brilliant. Some make life immeasurably easier.

But convenience cannot be the only measure of a good life.

Sometimes we need to go somewhere.

And when we do, it helps enormously to know what we are looking at.

That is what these books have in common.

Cassie Stokes says: go and discover Ireland.

Roz Purcell says: walk through it.

Warren Farrell says: look again, because somebody extraordinary stood here before you.

Donal Fallon says: that pub on the corner is not simply somewhere that sells pints. People made a city in rooms like this.

They give us information, certainly.

More importantly, they give us context.

And context turns looking into seeing.

Perhaps that is one of the quiet jobs books and bookshops can still do particularly well. They can send us somewhere we didn't know about, tell us why it matters and then, crucially, send us out through the door to experience it ourselves.

Because Ireland is not a checklist.

Neither, for that matter, is life.