Book love

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.  The man who never reads lives only one.”  -George R.R. Martin

I want to read everything.  Working at a library for the past two years has only intensified this desire.  Books come in on the rollers and I pause to contemplate many of them, to read how they begin, to examine the font and page texture, to read the synopsis, to study the author’s (sometimes awful) picture.  A coworker mentioned recently that she rarely buys books.  I can see the virtue in this–support your library, don’t clutter your house, give e-books a fair shake, etc. But I can’t imagine living in a house without books. It gives me the chills.  My dream is to one day live in a house full of built-in bookshelves, much like those my grandfather carved into the house he lived in for fifty plus years.  I doubt I’ll ever have a floor to ceiling library with a  gliding ladder like Beast gave Belle, but I can dream, right?

My love of books isn’t completely altruistic, though. As a writer, I also like to read because it shows me how others build worlds with their words. The more I read, the more I’m able to discover who I want to emulate and who I never want to be associated with.  I’m always looking for books that surprise me and show me that anything is still possible in writing.  Despite all of these doomsday prophecies that the contemporary novel is dead or that no one reads short fiction or that creative nonfiction is nothing more than navel-gazing or that poetry is inscrutable hipster drivel, I believe that all forms of writing have infinite possibilities.

And that, folks, is the point of this blog: if you love books, writing, words, or some combination thereof, hopefully you’ll find something to love here, too.