“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami
Picture yourself walking through the halls and shelves of a vast library. Among the endless rows of books, one catches your eye. You reach out, and as your fingers graze its spine, there’s a moment of connection, a spark of recognition. It’s as though fate has guided your hand to this particular book, at this precise moment.
Once you start reading, it feels like you’re embarking on a journey with this book. Its words lead you down paths of discovery, challenging your perspectives and opening new horizons. You find yourself nodding in agreement, pausing to think, and sometimes even disagreeing with it.
As you read, you realize that this book isn’t just something you’re consuming; it’s becoming a part of you. Its characters, its ideas, it’s prose.
Sometimes books seem to find us by chance. You might stumble upon a forgotten book on a dusty shelf, find a book left behind on public transportation, or receive one as a gift unexpectedly. In the novel, Rabbits, one of the recurring themes of playing the game is…the game chooses you to play, not the other way around.
The older I get, the more cynical I become. Nationwide chain bookstores are all the same by design, so if you can make it past the coffeeshop, past the rows of tiny trinkets designed for you to grab while waiting to purchase, past the Bestsellers(!) that everyone else is pushing, past the toy section that is there for no explicable reason besides another money grab and past the music/collectible culture sections, then and only then you may come to the bookshelves and hope to discover a unique book, one that resonates with you.
I prefer the used bookstore. Each store is unique and forces you to hunt on every shelf. Because every shelf has treasure on it waiting to be discovered. The books there seem almost tangentially organized, like they were arranged according to conversation rather than by category. There’s a loose structure, a rough outline, the topics, and genres move seamlessly from one to another, and sometimes off shoot to unintended places, places where one has lost their train of thought, when one must pause to reflect and wonder how they even got there. This isn’t the kind of book store you go to looking for something specific. If you do, you’ll, more than likely, leave disappointed and unimpressed. If you’re searching for specificity, you probably won’t find it here. This is not the kind of book store you go to seek out “a book”. This is the kind of book store in which the books start to seek you.
“Somewhere, there is a book written just for you. It will fit your mind like a glove fits your hand.” — Neil Gaiman
One of my favorite books is titled A Gentle Madness by Nicolas Basbanes, wherein the author describes perfectly how a bibliophile gets caught up in their passion for books, libraries, and knowledge. I used to be a bibliophile, but thankfully not drawn completely into madness. Having said all that, to say:
The right book chooses you as much as you choose it. It’s a meeting of minds and souls, a serendipitous encounter that can enrich your life and leave you grateful for the magic of literature.