Archives for January 31, 2017

From 2007:

“God, I love this guy,” said the young man at the Barnes & Noble cash register from whom I purchased a couple of Elmore Leonard paperbacks the other day. “There’s nothing better to read on a plane.” Three days earlier I’d been sitting in the restaurant of a hotel in Washington, D.C., reading Unknown Man #89 as I ate my breakfast, when a balding, middle-aged businessman stopped at my table and said, “You’re going to love that one.”

I mention these two encounters because they’re the only times in recent memory that a stranger has spoken to me about a book I was reading—and both of the strangers in question happened to be men….

Read the whole thing here.

“As far as I in particular am concerned, reading in general belongs to my methods of recuperation; consequently it belongs to that which rids me of myself, to that which enables me to wander in strange sciences and strange souls—to that, in fact, about which I am no longer in earnest. Indeed, it is while reading that I recover from my earnestness.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo