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

Reading time became my time and place, another dimension where events operated by my own set of rules.

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

things I wanted to remember: what I was reading when all that happened.

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.

We need to touch it, to examine the weight of its paper and the way text is laid out on the page.

People like me open books and inhale the binding, favoring the scents of certain glues over others, breathing them in like incense even as the chemicals poison our brains.