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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

sustained and immersive