Bookish Quotation du Jour

From the keyboard of Canada-based bookblogger “Cipriano“:

God grant me the serenity to accept that I can’t read all the books.
The courage to read the ones I can.
And the wisdom to quit buying more.

Bookish Quotation du Jour

“I love books, but I love people who love books more.”  – Kelly Justice, owner of the Fountain Bookstore, Richmond, Virginia

Found via Shelf Awareness

No Time for Reading?

From Better Than Life by Dan Pennac (pages 145-147):

…No one has the time to read. Children don’t, teenagers don’t, adults don’t. Life is a perpetual plot to keep us from reading….

Time spent reading is always time stolen. Like time spent writing, or loving, for that matter….

Time spent reading, like time spent loving, increases our lifetime.

If we were to consider love from the point of view of our schedule, who would bother? Who among us has the time to fall in love? Yet have you ever seen someone in love not take the time to love?

I’ve never had the time to read. But no one has ever kept me from finishing a novel I loved. …

The issue is not whether or not I have the time to read (after all, no one will ever give me that time), but whether I will allow myself the joy of being a reader.

“If It Ain’t Broke…”

From Susan Hill’s memoir, Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home (page 87):

 ”It ain’t broke: the book, that is. I know because I just went round the house looking for something to read, and on the way I reassured myself that as the book ain’t broke around here, I do not propose to fix it with an electronic reader. Yes, let’s use the whole word. Let’s tell it like it is. Electronic reader. Something monotonous-looking and made of plastic, is grey and has a screen…I will stick to paper and print and pages for reading books. If it ain’t broke. Of course, someone wants to persuade us that it is so that they can sell us their device. ‘Twas ever thus.” 

Note to our readers: Somehow we missed the news of this book when it was published a year ago this month. We’ve duly added it to the blog’s list of Books about Books.

Found at Citizen Reader

The Book as Shape-Shifter

Today’s Bookish Quote is from Ben Ehrenreich’s “The Death of the Book,” an essay posted to the preview issue of the soon-to-be-officially-launched Los Angeles Review of Books:

“All of our words for book refer, at root, to forms no longer recognizable as such: biblos being the Greek word for the pith of the papyrus stalk (on which texts in the Greco-Roman world were inscribed); libri being Latin for the inner bark of a tree, just as the Old English bóc and Old Norse bók referred to the beech tree. Likewise “tome” is from a Greek word for a cutting (of papyrus) and “volume” is from the Latin for a rolled-up thing — a scroll, which is the form most texts took until they were replaced by folded parchment codices. Prior to the late 13th century, when paper was first brought to Europe from China, the great works of Western civilization were recorded on the skins of animals. The Inca wrote by knotting strings. The ancient Chinese scrawled calligraphy on cliffs. (Do mountains count as books?) The printed, paper book, as we know it, dates only to the mid-fifteenth century, but those early Gutenberg exemplars were hardly something you’d curl up with on a rainy Sunday afternoon. The book as an affordable object of mass production — as something directly kin to the books that line our shelves — was not born until the 19th century, just in time for the early announcements of its death.”

Found via The Second Pass

Homage to the Reader

Junot Diaz, teacher of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, included the following remarks in a May 2008 speech to a writers’ festival in Australia:

“Writers might be word magicians but we readers are the new alchemists. Without a reader a book is simply a stack of papers dense with type and edged in glue. But when a reader grabs hold of a book, when a reader introduces her mind and heart and body to a book, that book is transformed, becomes something extraordinary.

Readers supply the galvanic human spark that bring these Frankenstein creations we call books to life. Readers transmute cold paper and stale ink into vibrant human gold. Readers are the nervous system of literature and readers alone can reach through time and space and connect one imperfect human soul with another they have never met. They can bridge the spaces between us, all through the simple act of reading.

We readers, I suspect, will be remembered more than any individual writer for safeguarding that delicate web of human interconnectivity that so many forces wish to buy, capture, enslave and mine.

Readers will be remembered long after we are all gone for holding the line against the dehumanising forces of our civilisation. Even if tomorrow all the books of the world disappeared in a flash of woodpulp and binding it would be you, you readers, who would keep the dream of that human alchemy alive.

For it is in the simple act of reading where the living and the dead, the real and the imagined, meet. It is in the simple act of reading where we exercise those two most sacred of human vocations: compassion and creativity. For as we know, without either of these primes there is no possibility for a humanity present or past worth talking about.”

Australia’s Sydney Herald published a transcript of Diaz’s brief but moving speech.

Found via Sites and Soundbytes, which posted from Diaz’s speech not his comments on readers, but his definition of literature.

Bookish Quotation du Jour

“If there exist connections among the books I read and the order in which I choose to read them, it’s news to me. Except for the few times I’ve read a writer’s work systematically – Shakespeare, Dickens, Melville, Henry James – I’ve always followed an intuitive path. Mentioning Dickens reminds me of another Pessoa observation in The Book of Disquiet: ‘One of my life’s greatest tragedies is to have already read The Pickwick Papers. (I can’t go back and read them for the first time.)’”

- Patrick Kurp, excerpt from a September 11, 2010 posting to Anecdotal Evidence

Library Quotation du Jour

“More than a building that houses books and data, the Library has always been a window to a larger world–a place where we’ve always come to discover big ideas and profound concepts that help move the American story forward. . . . . Libraries remind us that truth isn’t about who yells the loudest, but who has the right information. Because even as we’re the most religious of people, America’s innovative genius has always been preserved because we also have a deep faith in facts. And so the moment we persuade a child, any child, to cross that threshold into a Library, we’ve changed their lives forever, and for the better. This is an enormous force for good.“  - Barack Obama, June 2005

Found via The Short List

Bookish Quotation du Jour

“That’s what I love about reading: one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you to another book, and another bit there will lead you onto a third book. It’s geometrically progressive – all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment.” – Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (2008)

Bookish Quote du Jour

“I don’t change what I read when I go to the beach or on a vacation. I just read more.”

–Michael Chabon, quoted in Slate’s “My Favorite Beach Book”

Found via the New Yorker’s Book Bench