The people of the book
“We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure the books that we inherit from our parents and we relish the idea of passing our beloved books onto our children.
We force worthy books on our friends and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird – and possibly inappropriate – kinship with people we see reading a beloved book on public transit or airplanes.
If anyone tried to take away our books, some government censor or a mad prude, we would defend them with everything we had.
We know our tribespeople, the other people of the book, because they inhabit homes given over to books. Walls lined with books, piled on the stairs, beside the bed, even bathrooms filled with damp swollen paperbacks.
Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain our moral, intellectual and imaginative influences: the things that makes us the people we are today.”
– Cory Doctorow, recorded at the Q2C Festival at the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo and heard by me on the awesome Big Ideas podcast
You said it, Cory!
This little nugget is William Wallace for those who love books. It is our rallying cry. And it was very motivating as the last thing I heard before I got out of my car to walk into work last night. ha!
I am especially appreciative of the last few sentences. Packing all of one’s belongings into boxes and then watching the boxes accumulate always gives me the urge to purge. Get rid of it. Why keep it? Move on. So much beauty and journey left to discover.
But some things I just can’t. Going through the books left from my hyper-religious phase, there were tomes that made me. And even though some of the tidbits I re-read as I flipped through made all of the feminist hairs on the back of my head stand up and shout, the gems I choose to keep were a real part of me. Other books have changed me, one gave me a motto for life and a particular shelf of hardcovers represents the time when my babies were still actually babies and those books my secret nap-time getaway.
moral… intellectual… and imaginative influences. love it. my life traced through the books i have read and will read through the years. make a list and put it in my obituary, ok? promise?
Now everyone scurry along and listen to the rest of this talk. If he is this awesome in the first three minutes, just imagine how great the rest of the talk is! You won’t be disappointed.
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Robyn
cecilia
Kalanna
Once while sitting in an airport in London I saw this man sitting with his wife across from me reading a book I knew and loved. The book was LDS fiction and immediately told me so many things about him. 1)he had good taste in books 2)he must love books since he was carrying a hardback copy on multi continent flight. 3) he was the same religion as me!!!!
I wanted to lunge across the seats and shake his hand and smile and talk about the book and take it from him to show him the parts I liked!
But I resisted the urge and merely moved closer to him… as if I could get him to start the conversation so I could say, “Hey! I love that book.”
Looking back on it I wonder if I seemed a little creepy.
too funny. i’ve had similar urges. what is it that makes us automatically create a kindred spirit out of a stranger based solely on the fact that they are reading a book we love?
we are our books indeed.