Every Reader Exists To Ensure For A

Books May Not Change Our Suffering, Books May Not Protect Us From Evil, Books May Not Tell Us What Is Good Or What Is Beautiful, And They Will Certainly Not Shield Us From The Common Fate Of The Grave. But Books Grant Us Myriad Possibilities: The Possibility Of Change, The Possibility Of Illumination.

At Different Times And In Different Places I Have Come To Expect Certain Books To Look A Certain Way, And, As In All Fashions, These Changing Features Fix A Precise Quality Onto A Book's Definition. I Judge A Book By Its Cover; I Judge A Book By Its Shape.

Through Ignorance, Through Faith, Through Intelligence, Through Trickery And Cunning, Through Illumination, The Reader Rewrites The Text With The Same Words Of The Original But Under Another Heading, Re-creating It, As It Were, In The Very Act Of Bringing It Into Being.

Every Reader Exists To Ensure For A Certain Book A Modest Immortality. Reading Is, In This Sense, A Ritual Of Rebirth.

I Remember, As A Child, The Confusion Of Not Knowing What This Place Was Where I Was Supposed To Spend The Night: It's A Disquieting Experience For A Child. And What I Would Do Was Quickly Unpack My Books And Go Back To A Book I Knew Well And Make Sure The Same Text And The Same Illustrations Were There.