Books talking
You let it out from time to time. Margaret Atwood, I like her. Or you tell someone you’ve just finished another Elmore Leonard novel. Rupert Thomson, I’ve read a couple of those, there’s always something . . .
Whatever, your tastes change and you get to the end of this author’s work and start on someone else. But all the time you’re putting it out. Faulkner, Carson McCullers, whoever it happens to be.
And the books keep coming in. Friends, people you’re close to, they listen and pick up on what you’re reading, the authors who are getting to you. So when these friends are out in the world, or they find themselves enjoying something you might have turned them onto, or they see that name you keep dropping in the window of a charity shop, they go inside and pick it up for you.
It’s magic. We always knew that books talked to each other, but they talk to your friends, too. If they can’t reach out to you directly, they’ll find some other way to get in your house.
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Man, that’s like… deep.
jb says: C’est la Vie . . .
My books don’t talk to me.
They yell.
“Why haven’t you read me yet?”
“Why did you buy me? For the haptic quality?”
“What, are you deaf, dumb AND blind?”
I put them into vitrines to muffle the sound.
jb says: I used to live with three haptic people in the same house when I was a student. A sculptor, we called her a sculptress back then; a potter; and a blind guy . . . we’d call him visually impaired now. Weird household, somebody always had their hands on me and it wasn’t always the hands I was dreaming about.
Any tactile reflexes you want to tell us about?
jb says: I’m sitting on my hands.