Tuesday, June 15, 2010

books and places

I will soon start the featuring of individual books, cause you can only talk about books in general so much before you reach the point of saturation.
However, not just yet.
There is still one reflection I would like to pester you with and it is on the relationship between books and places: the places we find them and the places we read them ( at least the ones that hold a special place in our heart).
So , if you are still sitting on those chairs and reading this, start thinking about your dear friends books and where you bought them, or borrowed them, or stole them, and where you read them.
I found the Idiot by Dostoevsky resting on a shelf in my grand-mother's house, in the country side, i believe during a spring of more than one decade ago, and read it sitting bent in two with the book sitting on my thighs and my forehead almost attached to the pages, I think I developed into a hunchback because of that book , although it was worth it.
I bought The catcher in the rye by Salinger in a Dublin bookstore and read it in a gigantic house without heat nor hot water for showers, but with the most beautiful piano that was sitting in a leaving room nobody was allowed in. I read it that winter, i remember it was cold , it rained a lot, but it was worth it as well.
I found Anna Karenina, Tolstoy, on a shelf at Lamplight Books. It was the first year the store opened. I would drop all the massive amount of work a new business requires and demands, and sat on a stool behind the counter to read it: nothing ,then, seemed more important than reading.
your turn now