> Difference of opinion, suppose. I find what you wrote above > an insult to > every author who ever wrote. I read for the words and ideas of the > writer and I'm quite confident that's why authors want to be read. >
the text is obviously the most important aspect of reading, but every writer I've ever met has also been a reader and has been in love with books. Most of the great novelists have at some time in their career written about the joys of books in much the same terms that Marnie and I have been using. As an example, have a look at George Orwell's essays - they're full of descriptions of the physical properties of books, and his love for them. Here is a quote from one of his well-known essays "Bookshop Memories" in which he describes how working in a bookshop destroyed his love of books. But even reading this you can tell that he does still love them: "There was a time when I really did love books - loved the sight and smell and feel of them, I mean, at least if they were fifty or more years old. Nothing pleased me quite so much as to buy a job lot of them for a shilling at a country auction. There is a peculiar flavour about the battered unexpected books you pick up in that kind of collection: minor eighteenth-century poets, out-of-date gazeteers, odd volumes of forgotten novels, bound numbers of ladies' magazines of the sixties. For casual reading - in your bath, for instance, or late at night when you are too tired to go to bed, or in the odd quarter of an hour before lunch - there is nothing to touch a back number of the Girl's Own Paper. But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles." That describes somewhat how I felt after working at the British Library for 18 months, but it goes away. Bob -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
