My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues

Nobody else on the planet has read this particular series of books in this exact order and been affected in precisely this way.

To whom do books belong? The books we read and the books we write are both ours and not ours.

the effects of inevitable change on a place you know and love, even as your memory clings to the familiar contours of its past.

You elect which world you enter and what knowledge you procure there.

It’s the perennial reader’s fantasy, the hope that the right book will magically spur strangers into intimate and telling conversations or elevate your standing in the eyes of people you already know.

sustained and immersive

it was okay and even right to read what you wanted rather than what you ought.

Nancy Drew taught me that a book wasn’t merely about the words within, it was everything—the quality of paper, the intoxicating smell of the binding glue, an older formulation that you didn’t get in newer volumes, the decorative end pages. It was the book as object, the vase as much a pleasure as the flowers.

There is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn’t be the goal.