You all miss me when I don't post, don't you? *waggles eyebrows* Yesterday I was so exhausted that I hated pretty much everything ever (except for this, because how can you hate that?), but I went home and napped and read some of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, which made me giggle, and now things are just peachy. So I bid you all hello. Now. Let's talk about books.
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Who allowed me access to gifs? This should not have happened. |
Last Sunday, I was reading bits of various things I'm in the middle of, and all of a sudden the sole thought that came into my head was "Shit, I love books." If I might quote from The Thirteenth Tale, which is quite enjoyable if not the best book ever and you all should read it because it says lovely things like this:
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humor, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in the ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.
Isn't that just wonderful? "Huzzah!" sayeth I. Because I'm one of those people who gets all weepy in church when the service says "With believers in every time and place," because then you think back on HUMANITY and how we are LINKED and it is just great. I will also choose this moment to mention the time I was at the French Medieval exhibit at the Art Institute and started crying in front of a tapestry and just made it awkward for everyone. Because people in the 1500s (specifically named people whose names I forget) had had that hanging in their hall, and they had LOOKED at it with their 500-year-old eyes, and then it was in the Art Institute and people now were looking at it, and -- oh, I shall get all emotional again.
So. Slight digression but not quite. Books are amazing, because Jane Austen can sit at her little desk in 1811 and write things down, and they can make teenage girls irate or all swoony in 2011 (hey! I didn't even pick 1811 on purpose! lookatthat!). George Eliot's opinions stand firm because she wrote them down, and Barnes & Noble considers her important enough to publish in their Classics Collection, ensuring people keep reading her. And not only do said opinions stand firm, they INFLUENCE us today. As do countless other authors, obviously. I mean, I love television, but I don't look to it or film for actual, deeply-held beliefs.
What was particularly delighting me on Sunday was that I had this pile of books, and each one had a different tone and purpose. Books are just so damn variable. And we're never going to be able to read all the ones we want to, but as my Victorian lit prof said in college, it's a much better problem to have too much to read than too little.
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