Bokelskere.no

I have lived so many lives through books, gone to so many places, so many eras, looked through so many different eyes, considered so many different points of view. The fact that I haven’t had time to do much myself seems but a small price to pay. I live my life quite as fully as I want, thank you. Books have not isolated me – they have connected me. What non-bookworms get by meeting actual people, we get from reading.

It is impossible, of course, to say exactly when childhood reading stops and adult reading begins.

There is always a suggestion that everything is in flux, that nothing can last. The best we can hope for is to live there for a while. And accept that if yew hedges and towering trees cannot endure, happiness too is best understood as fleeting.

She proceeds, through her odd way of seeing things, through her patently honest love of beauty and endearing attempts to master her various jealousies and yearnings, to win over the Cuthberts, their neighbours and millions of readers who have met her over the years since the book was first published. When I settle down with it these days, it is the gradual softening of Marilla that seems to me the true miracle of the book, but this only reminds me again of the great truth that you are never too young to start rereading.

On rereading, then, I learned that Anne Shirley is indeed a dear and most loveable child. Who could not, after all, adore anyone who insists that her name be spelled with the ‘e’ – ‘so much more distinguished. If you’ll only call me Anne with an e I shall try to reconcile myself to not being called Cordelia.

'And where was I?’ I asked.
‘Where do you think you were?’ she said. ‘You were at home. Reading. We told you we were going every time and you never broke eye contact with your stupid books. Sometimes you’d wave goodbye as you turned a page.'
I have wracked my brains, but I truly do not remember them going. I would question her veracity but a) I’m scared of her, and b) there’s no point. They surely went and I as surely didn’t notice. Such was the hold of a book back then. The intensity of childhood reading, the instant and complete absorption in a book – a good book, a bad book, in any kind of book – is something I would give much to recapture.

Stop a while, the safe, solid brick walls seemed to say, like generations of a certain kind of seeker after a certain kind of pleasure have done before you. Take your time. The books are here. You’ve got them. They’ve got you. What is it you’re looking for? An hour’s escapism? A quick explanation of a DIY problem that’s foxed you? A history lesson? A long investigation into some of the weightiest moral and philosophical issues that men have wrestled with down the ages? We’ve got ’em. And good radiators too.

Brave.
Zoe has no idea what that looks like.
She knows she ought to call Will’s parents, but instead, she sits on the floor and starts to turn the pages of Anne of Green Gables.

And there are books. Readers know that, when their heart hurts with loss or absence, then a book that they have read before can lessen the ache. Readers, faced with a new experience, find a book to help them navigate: a travel guide to a new city, say, but also a novel set there.
Readers give books to other readers, telling them, this will make you laugh, or, read this, please, so we can talk about it. Here you are, readers say, I don't know why but this made me think of you.
But what about when the pain is too generalised, or too acute, or too strange for us to self-diagnose? What happens when the new pain cannot be cured with the old medicine? Or when the problem seems too trivial to mention – we are not dying, we are not even coughing, we have no right to claim we are suffering – or too great to fix?
What if reading itself feels like a chore, or someone who has always found solace in books suddenly cannot find the energy or the empathy to so much as pick up a favourite paperback?
That's when a bookseller can help you.

So here is a contradiction for you: you can love books, and you can also decide not to finish a book.
Yes you can.
Books don't judge you.
Books can contain, and invoke, every feeling that there is. Books can bring you to rage or tears or happiness or all all three, in quick succession. Books can have such a profound effect on your emotions that they can change the course of your life. How many lawyers have been made by To Kill a Mockingbird, how many vets by the James Herriot books, how many teachers by Roald Dahl's Matilda?
This is how books work. They take what's in them, and what's in you, and the interface, more often than not, leads to picking up that book every chance you get. Sometimes the power is so great that you're up all night; sometimes you have to (and yes, I do mean have to) cancel a coffee date so you can get to the end.
And sometimes, there's a missing part of the chemistry. Or something in the book that just doesn't work for you. Or maybe the supposed romantic hero has the same name as the ex you will never quite recover from. It could be that the setting doesn't appeal or there's something in the way the characters relate to each other that doesn't fit into the receptor that you need it to fit into.
Sometimes, you do not care enough to want to read on.
This is something that books understand. That writers understand. That other readers understand. It's a fact of life. All foodies do not love bananas.
So if you haven't understood this yourself yet... take a moment. Take a breath. The next time you are fifty pages into something and rather than pick it up, you're scrolling through your phone... you can stop reading that particular story. You can donate or pass on that book, and you can start something else.
Reading should be a pleasure and a joy, an education and a promise, a release and an escape. The books you choose for yourself should never, ever feel like a punishment or a chore.

I’m always so ashamed when I discover how well-read other people are and how ignorant I am in comparison. If you saw the long list of famous books and authors I’ve never read you wouldn’t believe it. My problem is that while other people are reading fifty books I’m reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at the bottom of page 20, say, I realize I can recite pages 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years.

She sets her alarm for six every morning and reads in bed till seven; she said if she hadn’t formed that habit, she’d never find time to read anything. As it is, it seems to me she’s read everything.

Hun vasset utover til det plutselig ble dypt og hun kjente gyset av slimete sjøgress mot lårene. Da vannet nådde henne til brystkassen, trakk hun pusten, la seg på rygg og svømte utover. Nå, sa hun til seg selv, i dette øyeblikket, var hun akkurat det hun skulle være i livet. Hun så på horisonten og tok seg i å sende en takk til noe hun egentlig ikke trodde på.

Sometimes the people you loved left you halfway through a story.
Sometimes they left you without a goodbye.
And, sometimes, they stayed around in little ways. In the memory of a musical. In the smell of their perfume. In the sound of the rain, and the itch for adventure, and the yearning for that liminal space between one airport terminal and the next.

Change wasn’t always a bad thing, like my aunt had convinced herself to believe. It wasn’t always a good thing, either. It could be neutral—it could be okay.
Things changed, people changed.
I changed, too. I was allowed to. I wanted to. I was.

And, in turn, that monster didn’t let her see all the things she would miss. The birthdays. The anniversaries. The sunsets. The bodega on the corner that had turned into that shiplap furniture store. The monster closed her eyes to all the pain she would give the people she left—the terrible weight of missing her and trying not to blame her all in the same breath. And then you started blaming yourself. Could you have done something, been that voice that finally broke through? If you loved them more, if you paid more attention, if you were better, if you only asked, if you even knew to ask, if you could just read between the lines and—
If, if, if.
There is no easy way to talk about suicide.
Sometimes the people you love don’t leave you with goodbyes—they just leave.

It still smelled the same as I remembered. Of old books and weathered leather and crinkly paperbacks with broken spines, romances and adventures and fantasies and travel guides, paperweights to picture books. When she wasn’t traveling, my aunt read. She pored over stories, drowned herself in words. In the summers between our adventures, she’d build a pillow fort and crawl underneath it, lit with fairy lights and lavender-scented candles in mason jars, and we’d read together. Sometimes I spent entire weekends adventuring with Eloise or solving mysteries with Harriet.
There was something just so reassuring about books. They had beginnings and middles and ends, and if you didn’t like a part, you could skip to the next chapter. If someone died, you could stop on the last page before, and they’d live on forever. Happy endings were definite, evils defeated, and the good lasted forever.