And now librarians are REALLY mad.

The sky today is oddly blue, the air unseasonably warm for late October. The leaves outside our big glass panes are amber and gold, but the sun is shining through them. I soak up as much of it as I can. Soon the storms will come, and I will need the memory of sunshine on my face to get through December.

In a collection of six short stories he compiled and called "after the quake," Haruki Murakami describes the lives of six random people in the immediate aftermath of the 1995 earthquake that killed 6,434, injured 43,792, and displaced 310,000 citizens of the city of Kobe, Japan.

The brick-and-mortar shop is coming out swinging against online retailers.