But there is something thrilling about the wait; investing your time and energy to imagine and create those characters in your mind’s eye and envisage what might happen to them before someone else tells you. It’s the slowness I like. Everything today is so rushed and hurried, but I find there is nothing better than relaxing with a good book.”Excerpt From: L. J. Dee. “Tyler : Book #4 The Hunter Brothers Series.” iBooks. This material may be protected by copyright.
My youngest brother had a wonderful schtick from some time in high school, through to graduating medicine. He had a card in his wallet that read, ‘If I am found with amnesia, please give me the following books to read …’ And it listed half a dozen books where he longed to recapture that first glorious sense of needing to find out ‘what happens next’ … the feeling that keeps you up half the night. The feeling that comes before the plot’s been learned.
Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before...It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the world and life, and then I come along in two minutes and boom! it's all over.
If I show up at your house ten years from now and find nothing in your living room but The Readers Digest, nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel, and nothing in your bathroom but Jokes for the John, I’ll chase you down to the end of your driveway and back, screaming ‘Where are your books? You graduated college ten years ago, so how come there are no damn books in your house? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese?
This place is a mystery. A sanctuary. Every book, every volume you see, has a soul. The soul of the person who wrote it & the soul of those who read it & lived it & dreamed with it. Every time a book changes hands, every time someone runs his eyes down it's pages, it's spirit grows & strengthens. In this place, books no longer remembered by anyone, books that are lost in time, live forever, waiting for the day when they will reach a new reader's hands, a new spirit...
A snipit from my PR people:“A British author has revealed how he risked his life to infiltrate the Taliban while researching his new book on religious terrorism. Cal Sawar came face-to-face with Al-Qaeda chiefs in Pakistan while posing as a terrorist sympathiser. “The author, from Falkirk, Scotland, daringly managed to infiltrate the terrorist group — responsible for the deaths of countless Muslims and non-Muslims — by offering to help bankroll terrorist attacks on the UK.
Hundreds of thousands of people live in my library. Some are real, others are fictional. The real ones are the so-called imaginary characters in works of literature, the fictional ones are their authors. We know everything about the former, or at least as much as we are meant to know, everything that is written about a given character in a novel, a story or a poem in which she or he figures...The rest doesn't matter. Nothing is hidden from us. For us, a novel's characters are real. (p. 80
I picked up one of the books and flipped through it. Don't get me wrong, I like reading. But some books should come with warning labels: Caution: contains characters and plots guaranteed to induce sleepiness. Do not attempt to operate heavy machinery after ingesting more than one chapter. Has been known to cause blindness, seizures and a terminal loathing of literature. Should only be taken under the supervision of a highly trained English teacher. Preferably one who grades on the curve.
A snipit from the PR people:“A British author has revealed how he risked his life to infiltrate the Taliban while researching his new book on religious terrorism. Cal Sawar came face-to-face with Al-Qaeda chiefs in Pakistan while posing as a terrorist sympathiser. “The author, from Falkirk, Scotland, daringly managed to infiltrate the terrorist group — responsible for the deaths of countless Muslims and non-Muslims — by offering to help bankroll terrorist attacks on the UK.
A snipit from the PR people:“A British author has revealed how he risked his life to infiltrate the Taliban while researching his new book on religious terrorism. Cal Sarwar came face-to-face with Al-Qaeda chiefs in Pakistan while posing as a terrorist sympathiser. “The author, from Falkirk, Scotland, daringly managed to infiltrate the terrorist group — responsible for the deaths of countless Muslims and non-Muslims — by offering to help bankroll terrorist attacks on the UK.
If you take a book with you on a journey," Mo had said when he put the first one in her box, "an odd thing happens: The book begins collecting your memories. And forever after you have only to open that book to be back where you first read it. It will all come into your mind with the very first words: the sights you saw in that place, what it smelled like, the ice cream you ate while you were reading it... yes, books are like flypaper—memories cling to the printed page better than anything else.
I know, you've been here a year, you think these people are normal. Well, they're not. WE'RE not. I look in the library, I call up books on my desk. Old ones, because they won't let us have anything new, but I've got a pretty good idea what children are, and we're not children. Children can lose sometimes, and nobody cares. Children aren't in armies, they aren't COMMANDERS, they don't rule over forty other kids, it's more than anybody can take and not get crazy.
We human beings build houses because we're alive but we write books because we're mortal. We live in groups because we're sociable but we read because we know we're alone. Reading offers a kind of companionship that takes no one's place but that no one can replace either. It offers no definitive explanation of our destiny but links us inextricably to life. Its tiny secret links remind us of how paradoxically happy we are to be alive while illuminating how tragically absurd life is.
Systematisches Lesen ist kaum von Nutzen. Offizielle Bücherlisten (der Klassiker, der Literaturgeschichte, der zensurierten oder empfohlenen Bücher, der Bibliothekskataloge) können per Zufall den einen oder anderen nützlichen Hinweis geben. Die beste Anleitung bieten persönliche Launen – das Vertrauen auf das Lustprinzip und der Glaube an den Zufall -, die uns manchmal in einen provisorischen Zustand der Gnade versetzen, uns ermöglichen, Gold aus Flachs zu spinnen.
Books are a bad family - there are those you love, and those you are indifferent to; idiots and mad cousins who you would banish except others enjoy their company; wrongheaded but fascinating eccentrics and dreamy geniuses; orphaned grandchildren; and endless brothers-in-law simply taking up space who you wish you could send straight to hell. Except you can't, for the most part. You must house them and make them comfortable and worry about them when they go on trips and there is never enough room.
