The Bookshelf

I’ve always been an avid reader of books. My parents have an entire wall in their bedroom dedicated to books. As a child, I was in awe of the many different books, each with uniquely colored binding and a loopy or block-style font. I longed for the day when I would be able to pick up the book and read the black and white print inside. Until then, I admired the colorful pictures and interesting colors. Each page had a musky scent, a secret structure. It was a mystery to me, but I was fascinated by it, nonetheless.

As I got older, reading became a concrete part of my life. I would read one book after another, fascinated by stories, always having images in my head as interpretations of my own. I would read anything from science fiction to non-fiction. I loved to read girly books and serious classics. There was nothing I wouldn’t read. As I got older, my mother and I would share books. Every time I suggested a new book for her, I would get the honor of adding it to the bookshelf in their bedroom.

The reason I share my personal experience with books is to show you how much I appreciate what you have done. It seems that the age of technology is being glorified for its “green” benefits and its easy use, but no one seems to recognize the negative aspects, such as the loss of tradition, the straining of eyes, and the movement towards a visual book.

When I first started to read The Gutenberg Elegies, your prologue, and beginning chapters turned me off. I thought they were harsh and overly dramatic, and I couldn’t see why it was necessary for me to read with a dictionary on the table next to me so I could look up the numerous words I didn’t understand. I was frustrated. Your references made no sense to me, for I had never read or heard of most of things you mentioned, and I was unclear what your motive was—did you have a point, or were you simply a frustrated artist?

It was your chapter, “The Woman in the Garden” that really caught my eye in the end. You wrote:

What reading does, ultimately, is keep alive the dangerous and exhilarating idea that a life is not a sequence of lived moments, but a destiny. That God, or no God, life has a unitary pattern inscribed within it, a pattern that we could discern for ourselves if we could somehow lay the whole of our experience out like a map. (85)

It was that quote, and many others like it, that brought me to a sense of awareness. I realize now that I need to continue the tradition of reading and collecting books. I need to sit down with my children and show them the beauty of a storybook, and read them novels so that the characters can engross them. And then, perhaps, one day, they will stand in my bedroom, and gaze at the wall-to-wall bookshelf in awe.