All the bookstores I visited in Spain were strange and disorienting. None of them seemed to have the books in any order I could decipher-not alphabetical, not by title, not by subject, not by genre. This one was even wilder. There were books in all the languages of all the passing tourists who had come to exchange a finished book for a new one, stacked and crammed and boxed and falling over in heaps. Book nerdvana.

I was running out of time when I spotted a big thick paperback en ingles: Tandia, by Bryce Courtenay. He’s the author of my favorite-ever book, The Power of One. At that time his other novels weren’t published in the states, so I didn’t even know they existed. I turned it over to read the back. “…sequel to The Power of One…” I remember that at that moment the cover felt hot and I almost dropped it in shock.

I paid my however-many pesos and just made it back to the group in time to catch the tour bus. I read that book and cried over the characters all over Spain. I carried it in my backpack, even slept with it in my sleeping bag because I couldn’t bear to be parted from it. An American kid being united with a Canadian-published novel that she desperately needed but didn’t know existed, written by an South African ex-pat from Australia, in a used bookstore in Spain isn’t magic, I’m not sure what is.

Another quick one: I read the Hobbit in 3rd grade after I found it on my parents’ shelves. I tried The Fellowship of the Ring but I stopped right before the end. After Gandalf died, I knew there was no way they could make it. I cried and hid the book on the bottom shelf. In sixth grade I found The Fellowship of the Ring and read it, but stopped right before the end. It all seemed vaguely familiar, but I knew I couldn’t read on, as the Fellowship was doomed without help from Gandalf. I cried and threw it in a box. In eleventh grade I picked up this book called Fellowship of the Ring, and read it with a strange feeling of deja vu. Gandalf died, and I knew they were all screwed, but I was stronger emotionally, so I finished the book anyway and located the sequel. No reader has ever in the history of reading been more relieved than I was when Gandalf The White showed up. It was like a confirmation that the universe was not indiscriminately evil.

I read it while on holiday that summer in Madeira while lazing around on the beach. Now whenever I see that book on my bookshelf I think back to that time, over 10 years ago now, and being 17 years old in a foreign country in the hot sun with a whole world of opportunity wide open before me.

Anyway, ideas floating in space, waiting to blow our minds.

Books were never really a physical object. They’re made into them because the ideas inside are valuable enough to make it into a physical artifact.

Re: Hellbound Heart

You just described exactly why I have to unhinge myself from Amazon. I check the mail. I check the mail. I tap my foot. The anticipation!

Then, it arrives and I get to read it and it’s awesome!

4. Charleston SC based Aio Publishing has a small catalog of beautifully designed books, including three slender volumes by Zoran Zivkovic in matching black boards, and a signed, limited edition of Ian MacLeod’s “Summer Isles”. Several of their books have won design awards.

peace and love……

On reflection, so many of the most significant moments of my life have to do with books. I can think of two especially revelatory experiences or epiphanies. The first was reading Finnegans Wake a few months ago. Now, Joyce is one of my very favorite writers and I’ve read Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist, and Ulysses many times each, so I thought I would finally attempt the Wake this year (I had read several excerpts from it before). Nothing prepared me for how exhilarating, gorgeous, brilliant, and hilarious I found it to be, though – I felt like my eyes were on fire, like my head would explode. The sentences seemed to come alive and writhe and wrestle on the page, as though the book were a magic spell and not a work of fiction. It was so sublime and enrapturing I think I experienced Stendhal Syndrome; I even started to dream in words. As far as I’m concerned, it is the human race’s greatest artistic accomplishment.

The second experience was reading Bolano’s 2666 a few days after it first came out last year. I knew very little going in aside from a sketchy idea of what it was about and the massive acclaim it immediately received. But I didn’t expect for it to have such an effect on me – I read it nonstop for about two days and eventually finished it in the wee small hours of the morning. I was in a daze for a week afterward. It was all I could think or talk about; its images and characters and prose, its terrible beauty, continued to mesmerize me long after I closed the book. After reading and rereading the rest of Bolano’s English language oeuvre over the next months, I concluded that he is my favorite writer of all time, and that 2666 is his masterpiece, the greatest and most unforgettable novel in decades. I felt like I was taking part in some great cultural event by reading a future classic right after it was published, letting the story unfold on its own terms.

Another one off the top of my head was Tom Disch’s 334, which still moves, horrifies, and haunts me. I’ve never felt so emotionally drained or numb after finishing a book. And then there’s Steve Aylett’s Lint, a novel that changed my life…but I could go on forever about powerful reading experiences.