Perhaps to build enthusiasm for its annual book festival that took place this past weekend, The LA Times Op-ed section featured a moving ode to books (free registration required) by one Salman Rushdie (tip from Apul).
Books, since we are speaking of books, come into the world and change the lives of their authors for good or ill, and sometimes change the lives of their readers too. This change in the reader is a rare event. Mostly we read books and set them aside, or hurl them from us with great force, and pass on. Yet sometimes there is a small residue that has an effect. The reason for this is the always unexpected and unpredictable intervention of that rare and sneaky phenomenon, love. One may read and like or admire or respect a book and yet remain entirely unchanged by its contents, but love gets under one’s guard and shakes things up, for such is its sneaky nature. When a reader falls in love with a book, it leaves its essence inside him, like radioactive fallout in an arable field, and after that there are certain crops that will no longer grow in him, while other, stranger, more fantastic growths may occasionally be produced. We love relatively few books in our lives, and those books become parts of the way we see our lives; we read our lives through them, and their descriptions of the inner and outer worlds become mixed up with ours — they become ours.
That’s some deep stuff. Walking around the festival yesterday I stumbled across a modest line of people waiting for Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni to sign her book at the Artwallah table. Artwallah incidentally just released their book Shabash! which they refer to as “the hip guide to all things South Asian in North America.” The highlight of my day was when I made it over to listen to Jared Diamond speak about his book Collapse. Fascinating. Book festivals kick ass.
It’s true, it’s true. If you fall in love with a book it does stay with you forever. I swear, the real reason I started my blog was because I kept having these little bits of prose sloshing around in my head, and I just didn’t know what to do about that. I felt like the words were there, valiantly trying to make connections with each other, but my slow and heavy brain just couldn’t help the words find each other (no jokes about me being a righty, now….)
Also, the other reason I BLOG (ugliest word ever) is to complain. I do that well.
I love, love, love books. Yup.
Ummm…. yeah, what she said. 😉
i only blog because i need and crave attention which i don’t get from the opposite sex.
One apposite book quote deserves another, to wit: “It seems that the taste for books grows with intelligence, a little below it but on the same stem, as every passion is accomplished by a predilection for that which surrounds its object, which has an affinity for it, which in its absence still speaks of it. So, the great writers, during those hours when they are not in direct communication with their thought, delight in the society of books. Besides, is it not chiefly for them that they have been written; do they not disclose to them a thousand beauties, which remain hidden to the masses?” (Proust; Reading in Bed)
what a beautiful quote (Rushdie’s. no offense to Proust)
His “The Ground Beneath Her Feet” is one such radioactive growth, to me.
sounds more like some ‘science fictioned’ love when they speak of radioactivity
Is there any kind of love better than science fiction love?
Yeah, she blinded me with science.