This isn’t really a blog post.
It’s like the old Coke Cola commercial that says “share a Coke and a smile” while happy people pass around glass bottles of cola. See, I read this great little Essay by Anthony Doerr, author of Pulitzer Prize winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See, and soon to be movie. Besides adding his novel to my TBR pile, while anticipating the film, I poked around his website. This little gem caught my eye and, well, it was just too true not to share with other story aficionados like myself.
Here’s a lovely quote from the essay entitled, Books, Memory, and the Twelve Bright Stars Scratched Across page 302, published on the NW Book Lovers’ website. Have you read any of Anthony Doerr’s books?
It is the weather in which one reads a book that interpenetrates the paper. It is the mood one is in, the mindset one carries, the hunger in one’s gut, the quality of the sunlight falling across the page. It is the little coffee stain on page 29, the twelve bright stars scratched ecstatically across page 302.
Maybe, rather than copies, a more precise way to think about books on the shelves of a bookshop is to think of them as something closer to recipes. The execution of a recipe, after all, depends on a thousand variables: elevation, humidity, the freshness of the vegetables, the temperature of the oven, the kind of metal in the pan, how much wine the cook has been drinking. (Continue…)