You’d think that once the travel and jetlag are over, things would be more or less as before. Apparently that’s only true if you don’t have a baby. Perhaps next time I’ll bring Massimo’s sitter with me?
It’s times like this when a guest post is much appreciated. John Addiego, author of The Islands of Divine Music, was kind enough to share his thoughts about books as objects, especially now that he has a book with his name on it. Without further ado:
I love the heft and feel of a book. I won’t hold it against the commuters plugged into their electronic books—I’ve heard that some even give the illusion of page-turning and book-marking—and I enjoy an audio book on the road, but I’ve always loved the physicality of a book. My mom was a reader, and I remember digging through used books with her in off-campus stores on rainy days. There were shelves and stacks and piles of books to hunt among, skyscrapers of old books. In my late teens, when I fell in love with certain authors, I returned to these stores for hidden treasure. I remember rooting among the volumes in that musty smell of leaves and dust, something like the duff under trees, and finding the Collected Yeats. Some college student had written margin notes: Symbol? Celtic myth? Maude, again?
Getting to hold my own new book is a thrill. It has a lovely cover and binding, and the typeface is suggestive of long-ago times. The publisher has given it a sense of presentation I didn’t anticipate, but it fits and complements the story. In this way it is starting to take on a life of its own, a child entering the adult world and making eccentric friends.
I have so many memories of reading in the great outdoors, on trains and buses, books I carried in a knapsack with my journal. I remember reading Dune while hiking through the Southwest, Siddhartha all night on a train while snow slid down the window and sparkled in moonlight. In France I observed a woman sitting across from my wife and daughter in a train compartment, reading what I took to be a mystery, and I was struck by the open expression on her face, and the way she caressed the volume before placing it in her satchel. I think it’s that intimacy of a book that I love, especially as we come to the end, and close our eyes, and hold it close.
I so enjoyed reading The Islands of Divine Music, which reads like a collection of short stories about one family (kinda like Natasha: And Other Stories by David Bezmozgis). I hope you’ll check it out.
