A charming little riff, Eric. This was just my relationship with Lord
of the Rings. Too much hype in the sixties. Couldn't read it then.
Moved to Toronto. A friend pressed on us a slip-jacketed set in the
seventies. Couldn't read it then. Moved to North Bay where it sat for
another five years. Opened it one summer day on the beach. Read all
three books out loud to my husband and son -- every night -- forty pages
at a time. The sadness was palpable as we neared the end. The last
night, we closed the book and went to bed without a word.
A reviewer somewhere said once that he envied anyone who hadn't read it
yet. So do I.
Ursula, not twenty feet from her copies, but a hundred years from that
self that hadn't read it yet.
Eric Yost wrote:
Do you believe in "book destiny"? I'm not sure if there's a better term for it. Let me try to explain "book destiny."
A friend tells you about book X. It sounds interesting but doesn't fit with what you're reading at the moment. Weeks later you read an essay that mentions book X favorably en passant. Have to read that some time, you think. Weeks after that, you are walking down Saint Marks and see book X in the bargain shelf outside East Village Books, marked down to $2.50. You buy it and take it home, where it sits on a pile of unread books for months. It's never quite the book you want to read...not quite yet. You pack up your books and move, unpack them, and put book X on a new shelf in a new apartment. No, not yet. Life goes through its motions and one day you take book X down and start it. You read 200 pages in a sitting. It's perfect! You can't read anything else until you finish it. You wonder why you didn't read book X earlier--such a great book, and it was there, all this time, waiting for you to read it.
The book was waiting for you to become its reader. It called to you and prepared you to read it, and patiently waited for you to become its reader--to accept the destiny of being the book's reader. And when the student was ready, the teacher appeared. Book destiny.
------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off, digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
