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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

sustained and immersive

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