In the course of my eight-night vacation in Miami Beach (still in progress), I had occasion to visit the famous independent bookstore located in the attractive Coral Gables neighborhood of Miami. A long, low-slung, hacienda-like building of two wings on either side of a large garden café where visitors drink coffee and converse, Books & Books, as it's called, is a remarkable success that has withstood the competition of e-books and created four other outlets in other sections of Miami.

In addition to selling books, the Coral Gables branch serves as a community center that attracts standing-room-only audiences to its nightly free lectures presented by prominent authors of important books. And it well may be that the success of Books & Books is in part because of these evening gatherings attracting book-lovers who then proceed to purchase books before they leave.

The success of Books & Books, and the immense attendance at its nightly lectures, has reminded me that tourists visiting almost any large city in the United States may find companionship or acquaintances at the book lectures that almost all of the large and famous independent bookstores in those cities present almost every evening. From the Tattered Cover in Denver, to Book Passage in the San Francisco Bay Area, to Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., to Powell's in Portland, Oregon, to Moes Books in Berkeley, to Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, at least 30 giant independent bookstores continue to thrive because they have become centers of discussion in addition to simply stores (each one of the several I've listed schedules near-nightly events). And each one of them has a café to which you repair following the lecture you have heard, there to meet and converse with intellectually-curious residents of the city in question.

When you visit any of the largest independent bookstores in America, you will usually find an evening schedule of free lectures and a large number of residents who show up for these talks. I can't think of a better way to meet residents of the city in question and learn something about their attitudes and opinion. It's the best way to turn an ordinary vacation into a vital one.