BookLust

Random Readings 6

   "You try," she said. "First a bite of some glue and then follow it with a crunch of the paper. And these squiggles. They are very tasty."
   Despereaux looked down at the book, and something remarkable happened. The marks on the pages, the "squiggles" as Merlot referred to them, arranged themselves into shapes. The shapes arranged themselves into words, and the words spelled out a delicious and wonderful phrase: Once upon a time.
   "'Once upon a time,'" whispered Despereaux.
   "What?" said Merlot.
   "Nothing."
   "Eat," said Merlot.
   "I couldn't possibly," said Despereaux, backing away from the    book.
   "Why?"
   "Um," said Despereaux. "It would ruin the story."

   – from The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

Random Readings 6

Steadily, the room shrank, till the book thief could touch the shelves within a few small steps. She ran the back of her hand along the first shelf, listening to the shuffle of her fingernails gliding across the spinal cord of each book. It sounded like an instrument, or the notes of running feet. She used both hands. She raced them. One shelf against the other. And she laughed. Her voice was sprawled out, high in her throat, and when she eventually stopped and stood in the middle of the room, she spent many minutes looking from the shelves to her fingers and back again.    

How many books had she touched?

             How many had she felt?

              – from The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

Random Readings 5

Books connect us with others, but that connection is created in solitude, one reader in one chair hearing one writer, what John Irving refers to as one genius speaking to another. It's simple to order books on-line, over the phone, or via catalogue and wait for the delivery man to scurry away before we open the door. But 90 percent of us who buy books still get out of the house and go to the bookstore, to be among the books, yes, but also to be among other book buyers, the like-minded, even if we might never say a word to them. Elias Canetti has described cafés as places we go to be "alone among others," and I've always felt this was true of the bookstore, too. It's a lovely combination, this solitude and gathering, almost as if the bookstore were the antidote for what it sold.

– Lewis Buzbee, The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop

Random Readings 4

Not so many years later, on a Saturday evening, Mr. Zephyr took young Ambrose to the newspaper's offices. He showed his son the collection of retired wood and lead typefaces on display in the lobby. Young Ambrose liked the way the small type blocks felt large and heavy in his hand. He liked the tidy way each type was organized – one letter, one cubby – in a large flat wooden drawer. At the same time, he was angry that Z lived in such a small space compared to A. It isn't fair, he said with a dark scowl.

   His father tut-tutted. Such is the manner of alphabets, he said. Some types are luckier than others. A may have more space in the drawer, but Z is no less important, particularly when it comes to words like zebra.

   Or Zephyr, said Ambrose, straightening his small back.

   Or Zanzibar, said his father. A place very far away.

   A place with two z's?

   Indeed. And two a's.

   I think I would like that place, said Ambrose.

                –  from The End of The Alphabet by CS Richardson

Random Readings 3

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek. To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.

             – Terry Tempest Williams
                 (emailed to me this morning by a great friend)

Random Readings 2

To write is to transform that inward gaze into words, to study the worlds into which we pass when we retire  into ourselves, and to do so with patience, obstinacy, and joy.

             – Orhan Pamuk, The Nobel Lecture, 2006.
                Translated, from the Turkish, by Maureen Freely.

Random Readings 1

From time to time I read Beth's death scene in Little Women, and I still turn to the final page of The Grapes of Wrath and shiver with the last line about Roseasharn's mysterious smile. I feel, holding the books, accommodating their weight and breathing their dust, an abiding love. I trust them, in a way that I can't trust my computer, though I couldn't do without it. Books are matter. My books matter. What would I have done through these years without the Leaford Library and all its lovely books?

             – from The Girls by Lori Lansens