Book lovers, unite!
"I love words, funky ones, cranky ones, utterly ridiculous ones as well as justified paragraphs, intense fonts and long sentences that shout for shortened versions. I’ve been living in Ireland for 12+ years now, and honey, we simply don’t do short sentences in Ireland. Ask Joyce, who once wrote something so flabbergastingly fantastic that he forgot to add punctuation, a sentence of 4,391 words, no less. Molly Bloom must’ve gasped for air once she finished dreaming or thinking it. I am still gasping for air after tackling Ulysses. Talk about kick ass literature."
The virtue of books
Writing is cathartic, it empties your mind of needless clutter and thoughts that make you feel unhappy, unheard. I started writing as a way to deal with an illness that cannot be cured, but it turned into much more: a passion, a craze. If you write for the right reasons, you add value to your life. If you do not write to get published, and you’re not looking for recognition or fame, then you’re writing because you have to write. You just need to write. You cannot but write. Acknowledgement is nice, but it is not why I sit down with an empty, white page in front of me; it is not my goal. I write because I want to share. Where a painter picks up his brush, I have…
The imperfection of books
An old book is lying next to me, and it begs me to pick it up and read it. The imperfections of it make me feel as if this book has lived, and that it wants to be cherished for a long time to come. The cover is wrinkled, the pages discoloured and I sense that a lot of time thinking about the content has happened. It is beginning to have that old book scent, the scent only loved by true bibliophiles. It makes me want to revisit my old library, imperfect because all available space has been filled by other books, yet cherished because I know every corner of the library and what hides in them. The old, creaking seats I used to sit in, to fall under another book’s…
Welcome to the book fetish club!
“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” (Joseph Brodsky) There’s no certainty in life anymore. You can lose your job… just like that; you can be so stressed your heart starts beating much too fast or you can end up in fights even when you tried so hard to avoid having words. But then… there’s your bookcase. That tall, sturdy oak piece of furniture that holds secrets, explains wars, teaches you a foreign language, helps you relax or take you to some imaginary world you wished you could live in. I can sit in my living room, bedroom or any other place where I have books lying around and just look at those books. Enjoy their silence even when their characters scream for…
