Mark Andrews: Why an Austin Montego beats Katie Price every time

On balance, that is probably a good thing. I've got far too many books and magazines, and I keep adding to the collection. There have been plenty of warning signs along the way. Maybe I should have taken the hint when I got a book home, and found it was identical to one I already had, only with an updated cover. Or maybe I should have realised the habit was getting out of hand when I felt the need to convert a spare room in my house to a library. And I never get rid of any of them. Some people may find it odd that I still have copies of What Car? going back to the 1970s and 80s, even more so that I will still regularly take the time to revisit the question of whether the all-new Austin Montego meant British Leyland finally had a worthy challenger to fleet favourites the Ford Sierra and Vauxhall Cavalier. Given that the Austin brand didn't make it to the end of the decade, I guess we kinda know the answer to that question.

Yet while all the evidence suggests I don't need any more reading material, it is still the case that when I went to buy my groceries last Saturday, I managed to forget my carrots but come back with another book.

So the fact that I went into this good-sized book store, and couldn't find anything that would make me part with my money perhaps suggests all is not well in the industry.

Last year, people in the UK bought just over 209 million books, which sounds a lot, and indeed, there has been a steady recovery since sales hit a low of 180 million in 2014. On the other hand, sales are well down on a peak of 344 million sold in 2011.

But what also struck me was how the range of titles had changed compared to the last time I visited the same shop, probably towards the end of last year. It made me wonder whether the changing nature of the reading material on offer reflected how society is changing. And not in a positive way.

For example, my first port of call is usually the motoring section, which had now been whittled down to a couple of dozen books at the most, and many of these had been in print for a large number of years. So I headed over to the sports section, which was somewhat larger. But most of the books I might have been interested in, the ones about our local football and cricket teams had disappeared. In their place was an endless array of self-indulgent autobiographies about individual sportsmen, half of whom I had never heard of. Now that may in part be down to ignorance on my part, but I'm really not convinced that if you went into the street outside and showed them pictures of these individuals, many people would know who they were. It was all niche sports, the sort of sports that Britain always does well at in the Olympics, because nobody else bothers with them. And the one thing that struck me about all of these books, even the ones about the people I had heard of, was that they all related to how their authors had fought back from some kind of adversity. A bit like the way Alan Partridge bounced back from his Toblerone addiction.

Then there are the showbiz life stories, the rule being that the less important the individual, the more plentiful the life stories. I opened one of these books, by a former Big Brother contestant, and landed on a page where she was writing about her inability to wire a plug. The actress Emily Atack, who I only know for a bit part in The Inbetweeners, has already written her autobiography, and she's only 33. Then there's Katie Price, who as far as I know is famous for taking her top off and crashing her car, has managed to churn out six of them. Books, that is.

Most striking of all, though, was the fact that the biggest section of all seemed to be for something called 'smart thinking', which sounds horribly American. This appeared to be devoted entirely to a startling array of perceived grievances, from 'climate justice', whatever that is, through 'white privilege' and 'the demonisation of the working classes' to something called the 'patriarchy'. I thought a book called The Queen's English looked uncontroversial enough, hoping it might be something to do with the history of grammar or etymology. Needless to say, it was about something very different.

Yet while the grievances were manifold, the basic message seemed to be broadly the same: that most of the ills of this world were down to white men of a certain age, and their infuriating habit of breathing. At least this was true for most of the books, but there was one exception – that was a book about how men were the victims of societal changes imposed by age of the internet. It seems we're all victims now.

And this made me feel rather sad. The bookshop was only responding to public demand, and this is obviously what people like to read. It made me ponder how in so short a space of time we have become such a self-obsessed, inward-looking and angst-ridden society. None of this points towards a country at ease with itself.

And maybe that's why I still read 40-year-old car reviews.