Why Books Remain(der) | Read It Forward
“I had a friend once who looked at his library and discovered that even if he completely stopped filmmaking (he was a filmmaker too) and just decided to read the books he had in his library, it would take him until he was 100 years old. He was a little bit panicked. But he was courageous. He went out of his house. He went to the bookstore. And he bought ten books.” —Alain Resnais, director, Hiroshima mon amour
“We talked about books, how boring they were to read, but how you loved them anyway.” —Charles Baxter, Feast of Love
1.
Used bookstores ought to be melancholy affairs. If described in objective terms, you’re really just sifting through other people’s trash, their overstock, their leftovers. Books rest on the shelves like orphaned children, making gee-shucks eyes at passersby, their bindings pocked with the fault lines of age. Scrawled on the opening pages are handwritten notes, dedications, dates of birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, now years past and long forgotten. Some words are circled, underlined or annotated for a college course, now a memory. Stale air, musky odors. Continue reading…
Jonathan Russell Clark 