Preface: I love books with very literary characters, or books about books, or on reading. Maybe it's because I so love reading, and books, and anything literary or paper, that I enjoy self-aware books. This is probably why I really enjoy post modern lit. Books from the Romantic era and whatnot that insert phrases like "dear reader" do not count, but books that are not overtly self-aware but contain lists of words simply because they are beautiful do.
This book does a lot of both.
...I know only that I was reading in a wild, disorderly fashion.
I did not read everything word for word. Some books and magazines I skimmed as though I were flying over a landscape, and as I did I was aware of already knowing what was written in them. As a single word could summon back a thousand others, or could blossom into a full-bodied summary, like those Japanese flowers that open in water. As though something were striking out on its own to settle in my memory, to keep Oedipus and Don Quixote company. At times the short circuit was caused by a drawing, three thousand words for one picture. At times I would read slowly, savoring a phrase, a passage, a chapter, experiencing perhaps the same emotions sparked by my first, forgotten reading."
-p.117, "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana", by Umberto Eco
2 comments:
i would love to join this club you speak of. think! we could just sit around and go to estate sales and watch foreign movies and take pictures and paint and eat and sleep. what a glorious life that would be. k, now i want to marry rich so i can be a housewife...that's similar, right? =D.
mmm! a glorious life, indeed. lets try it :D
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