I find it amusing to reflect on the idea that mankind may sometime soon grow tired of reading and writers will do so too, that the scholar will one day direct in his last will and testament that his corpse shall be surrounded by his own books and especially by his own writings. And if it is true that the forests are going to get thinner and thinner, may the time not come one day when the libraries should be used for timber, straw and brushwood? Since most books are born out of smoke and vapour of the brain, they ought to return to smoke and vapour. And if they have no fire of their own in them, fire should punish them for it. It is thus possible that a later century will regard our era as a saeculum obscurum, because its production has been used most abundantly for heating the stoves.
A book can be represented as a conversation with one’s demon.
It used to be said that the world itself was a great book: that didn’t mean that its destiny was sealed in some kabbalistic scrawl; on the contrary, it showed that one had always, again and again, to manipulate its code, recombine its letters, and finally rewrite it.
Look,” I say, “digital is a temporary technology. Biotech is the new thing, and we’re going to have bookshops and libraries carried in artisan wooden shelving units on the backs of giant tortoises. The animals will migrate slowly around the world, and whenever they meet there’ll be a literary festival. Books will be exchanged between bookshelves the way bacteria exchange genetic information, and the shift in distribution and weight will govern the pattern of the tortoise’s next migration. The day a tortoise shows up in your town will be a kind of local festival, and their benign faces will fill the dreams of children.”

I, too, have eaten paper from old books. I remember as a girl tearing and eating the corners of pages as I read. Victorian paper tastes dry—better actually, than the paper used in newer books, which, if uncoated, tastes dull like chalk, or, if glossy, like tilefish or squid. When I ate the paper I took each corner the way one takes a communion wafer, flat on the tongue, feeling it dissolve. I ate not from hunger but because the page came to hand. I ate my way especially through the corners of the books. My mother (who used to eat library paste and paper too!) said that both of us must have suffered from a dietary deficiency. Therefore I am free to blame my behavior on an inherited craving.
Dirty books have played a role in sex education for decades. I still remember the bonkbuster titles by Jackie Collins, Shirley Conran and the like passed around classrooms in the 1980s with key pages folded down. And I still remember my surprise, aged maybe 13, at just how far consenting adults could deviate from the sober positions outlined in Peter Mayle’s Where Did I Come From?. These lurid scenes didn’t erase my wistful hopes for a kiss one day from the boy of my dreams, but lived alongside them. As a teenager, I secretly read Nancy Friday’s 1973 fantasy anthology The Secret Garden, discovered at a local library and studied in sequential visits as I was too shy to take it home. Much of this anthology of women’s wildest fantasies disgusted me - it’s extreme stuff even today - but it taught me about the divide between the imagination and the act. I also read Puberty Blues, a great book about how lousy a teen’s sex life could be, and Judy Blume’s sensible story of the first time, Forever.
I love penguins. This made my day.

I love penguins. This made my day.

tphd:

Interesting to note that people don’t understand fiction as magic. A piece of fiction is a spell. I hear people expressing their understanding (or parroting other’s understanding) of fiction as “transportive” but you must all secretly know that it isn’t true. It’s not you who is transported. Fiction is an act of conjuration. Evocation. It’s an invitation, and perhaps something is transported but it isn’t you. It’s more accurate to say that something has been let in.
What have you let inside you?
What have you invited in?

A library is a bush of ghosts and you swallow them, you well read men and women, you swallow all the ghosts and they go inside you and stay there. You do not know it but you are haunted by the books you’ve read. You’re a mansion on a hill with a clouded night-time backdrop and there’s lightning and the black roots of a half-dead tree, something like a claw. Or a map. It’s funny how all roads lead to death and I wonder what happens, when you die, to all the ghosts. You at the River Styx, vomiting into the water and all the ghosts like fishes, like spectral guppies in the black. The cold, black water, barely disturbed, and now you’re empty by the shore.

It’s not so bad, really.

It’s just new.

And quiet.

Borders (via thegirlandherbooks)

Borders (via thegirlandherbooks)

beenthinking:

Brought to you by Uptown Theatre (Taken with instagram)

beenthinking:

Brought to you by Uptown Theatre (Taken with instagram)

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read ‘The Lost Symbol’, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.