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About books...

29/5/2013

3 Comments

 
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People can spend their honestly earned money the way they like, obviously. I spend a lot of money on books. I have an insane passion for books, besides for their contents, books like concrete objects I mean.

I’m unable to read anything on those e-book readers or tablets or whatever, you know what I’m speaking off, I don’t know their right name in English either.

First of all it proves that I’m a real troglodyte, but at least I’m not a too stubborn and presumptuous one, because I have tried, before  deciding that those immaterial written words deprived me of the  subtle material pleasure of reading.

I know, I know…e-books can be stocked in huge quantity into the generous memory of a small iPad (or iPod? You see I even ignore happily and carelessly the difference between them), you can carry your private library everywhere, you don’t need to dust your books and to have big bookshelves to pile them up: it’s all quite true. Nevertheless I cannot live in a house without books mercilessly and randomly piled up everywhere and, even though I hate to dust, generally speaking, dusting my book allows me to have a kind of privileged physical contact with them and perceive a tactile symbiosis, having the impression to take good care of their well-being as well.

Sometimes I force myself to get rid of certain books which I didn’t like that much and, for sure, I would never read anymore. Even in this case I feel a kind of pain in eliminating them, as if they were innocent little soldiers which had done her duty, even though they had never been able to be brilliant heroes.

I have learnt, at least a little, to develop a certain instinct for books which can be meaningful for me, but I still commit mistakes in the delicate field of choice. Sometimes - fortunately it’s rare – I buy a book which I hate from the first pages. I feel immediately a kind of negative vibration. It’s not like the little soldier books I mentioned at all, the disappointing ones, which didn’t leave any impression, neither good or bad on me and I tend to get rid of, after a while to make some places for the new ones. When I start reading a book, which produces an immediate and often irrational sense of reject in me, I must throw it away instantaneously, as if it was something contagious which could infect my library. The intruder must be taken down in the street  and mercilessly condemned to  the public dusty bin. The last book which had this dramatic fate was one by the infamous Dan Brown http://www.pbase.com/mardoli/image/120719962.

We always learn something worthy from our mistakes. In all cases I nearly never buy a book choosing it from the best-sellers list. I have just come back from Florence and I have been told I should buy Brown’s last “opus”, which is located in Florence and Venice. Oh, never in my life. I have learnt the lesson.


3 Comments
Karen Mickleson link
30/5/2013 01:40:42 am

I am a troglodyte, too. I don't even have a cell phone. The library is my friend and I enjoy sitting in bed with my latest mystery, sinking into oblivion with the company of other hands which have held this book, spilled wine on it, let a bit of spaghetti sauce get on a page. I got an iPad to travel with but only use it when my nasty impatience takes over, the newest in a series beckoning to me.

Aren't librarians among the best people on earth? Helpful, calm, patient, not jagged. And it's just normal for them, not anything they try to do. They're just being the person they are who is perfectly suited to be a librarian.

I wish I shared your total lack of cynicism as you write about things which make me sad, too. As I have said elsewhere, the supplanting of human contact with texting words electronically which aren't words at all makes me dread the day that one of this generation, who will never know the feel of a book in her hands, becomes president of my country.

I spoke to an optometrist today, looking for a pair of specific LaFont frames. She tells me the young assistant she hired at 18 is now nearly 21 and getting married to a man she's never spoken to on the phone. They have only ever texted. Do you think they will speak in complete sentences to each other at meals, after sex, when they get home from work? Will they talk to each other about what they read and what it means to them? Will they even have the word 'meaning' in their vocabulary?

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Paulo Gama link
4/12/2013 09:12:56 am

Hi Marisa,
I could not agree more with you. Books must be real, one, who really loves reading, has the necessity of feeling them in the hands. My problem here is the amount of books, any kind. Like music, there are only two kinds of books: the good ones and the bad ones. And, again, I agree with you concerning D. Brown. Lol.

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SR MERCHANDISING link
8/11/2023 03:38:50 am

Great blogg you have

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    I'm the author of all the soap bubbles of thoughts, which are floating in this nearly private space.
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