I read this really lovely quote the other day from Wentworth Dillon, IV Earl of Roscommon : “Choose an author as you would a friend.”
It made me think about all the books I’ve read and how I met them. Most often, I choose books at the recommendation of someone whose opinion I trust. In recent years, those recommendations most often come from you – my blog community. But sometimes it’s a serendipitous happenstance that I recognize as a blessing in retrospect.
I rarely choose a book at random and enjoy it. The one exception was The Reader; it’s one of my favorites, and now Bernard Schlink is one of my favorite authors, and the way that I found it felt sort of providential, like I was supposed to find it. It was sitting on a shelf in my local library, where I worked as a teenager. Its cover was beautiful, but when I opened the book I realized that it was placed upside down – to read it, you had to flip it over, and so to the rest of the world it looked as though you were reading it back-to-front and upside-down. The description on the back cover was intriguing, but I felt compelled to read it because of the misplaced cover, because I noticed that if patrons picked it up and noticed that the cover was a mistake, they often put it back down and found something else. When I read it, the secret in the story made it feel like I was meant to read it and if someone else didn’t choose it because of the cover, then it was a secret between me and that book alone, one that I would always treasure. They didn’t know what they were missing and I wasn’t about to tell them.
No matter how we meet books or people, the relationship requires trust, mutual interest, shared language. I love reading a book and thinking quietly to the characters and author, “Me too.”
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book·ish/ˈbo͝okiSH/Adjective
- (of a person or way of life) Devoted to reading and studying rather than worldly interests.
- (of language or writing) Literary in style or allusion.
- (of art and all manner of lovely things) devoted to the written word as a form of art and as a way of seeing the world.
- (of BethanySuckrow.com) anything of the aforementioned characteristics as they are found on the interwebs and reposted by Bethany, because bookish and writerly things always give reason for amusement.