Here is my post, a day late and a dollar short. My only defense is that last night I was slightly delirious and grouchy from an over abundance of napping, so my post would have been crap anyways. But anyways, we all know what excuses are like so I'm not going to belabor explaining myself.
The last novel we read had a theme that is central to my life, a love of books. However, it was astounding and slightly offensive to me that they weren't talking about the literature. The corporeal body of a book is a beautiful thing. It takes on it's own traits, it own smell, it holds memories for those who read them, but books are really about the literature!
A good book is like a waking dream you can relive over and over. It takes you and allows you to be someone else, or teaches you a moral, or relates with your inner being like no other human ever has!
One may pick up a specific book and look at it and say: "I read this when I was seven years old. I adored it because I felt like no one loved me, just like Mandy." or "Look at those ruined pages. I dropped this book in the bathtub when I used to spend hours in the bathroom reading."
A true lover of books, doesn't want them because they're rare, or they think they lend a feel of affluence. No, someone who loves books, loves them for the way they come into your life, and touch your mind in their own unique ways. They love them for the snapshot of time a book is, both in its story and in the way it says something about the past you.
Mostly, I was bothered by the title of this excerpt. Gilkey didn't really love books at all. If he did, he would be stealing them for the sake of reading them, not to abandon the poor things on a shelf to 'look good'.
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I agree entirely, and not just because I'm to tired to put up much of a fight.
ReplyDeleteA few weeks ago, my parents went to the Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale. I wish I could have gone; searching through scores of books in an aircraft hanger is great fun. Anyway, they asked me if I wanted them to look for anything. I said "La Mere Coupable, in French, and any scores by Vicente Martin y Soler." (I tend to like rarer and more obscure books, but I wish that they were more common so I could get my hands on them more easily.)
Needless to say, they didn't find either (was it really needless to say? I don't know. I guess it depends on your knowledge of the aforementioned items). They did, however, find (among other things) a copy of the Oevres Completes de Moliere (WHY CAN'T I HAVE ACCENTS ON THESE COMMENTY THINGIES? I NEED GRAVES &c!). Well, actually it's just the second volume.
They asked me if I wanted them to send it to me, which I did, so they did (along with a vocal score of the Mozart Requiem and 3.5 dozen cookies in 3 varieties, which really have no bearing on these literary musings).
I enjoy reading French plays in French. (Moliere really doen't suffer much in translation, but my favorite playwright of all time, Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, loses so much.) It was very strange to me to find on the endpapers the legend "Laura McCurdy, Paris, 1893." (There is no publishing date.) I initially wondered (well, not really, but it makes for a better story) why my parents didn't mention that the book was at least 110 years old (which isn't actually that old). But then I realized (who says I can't write fiction?) that it wasn't Laura McCurdy (whoever she was) who sold them on the book, but Moliere.
So, um, go me.