2018.11.01
"...Even as a stimulus for reminiscence, a treasured book is more important than a dance card, or the photo that freezes you in mid-teeter at the edge of the Grand Canyon, because such a book can be a significant event in the history of your reading, and your reading should be an essential segment of your character and your life. Unlike the love we've made or meals we've eaten, books congregate to form a record around us of what they've fed our stomachs or our brains. These are not a hunter's trophies but the living animals themselves."Not sure I agree with all of it but it's well put. The whole piece is a celebration of the physical character of books (but only briefly puts a knock on e-readers.)
I had the idea that after year of mostly e-reading I should purchase physical copies of the books I deemed 4 or 5 star - though those would hang around as pristine copies, devoid of signs of the physical journeys I undertook with it, that Gass so praises.
The flip side to it: unread books accumulate in Kindle-space too, of course, but the stack on the bottom of my bedside table (often graphic novels or things I couldn't get e-copies of) is somehow more condemning than the lists on the screen.
(Ah well. I think to my friend Jessica's kind of habit of having favorite authors she can meet in person autograph her Kindle device, which I find endearingly quirky.)
A lot of the jokes are kinda sexist and predictable but Carol Burnett doing a gender-swap Star Trek Original Series is worth knowing about -
On the Augean Stables of comment spam, and git-r-done ux.