Powers may try to divide you
By telling you others look down on you
That only the privileged read
That books are unpatriotic and pathetic
This is something you can never believe
Harvard is not your enemy
Nor the immigrant who works nights
Nor the Amish soul reading by candlelight
Everyone is welcome here
through books we can unite
never surrender your access to
illumination and delight
you can burn books
but you can’t destroy
the part of me
that finds books
beautiful
On backroads of NH
an old bookshop
I leave with love poems
of Pablo Neruda, Civil Disobedience
by Thoreau, Taoist Classics
translated by Thomas Clearey and a
biography by Tariq Ramadan
I leave with treasures
with the freedom that
these books contain
In 2014, 27% of Americans didn’t read a single book. How do we change that? People who make and market books probably assume that 27% of people aren’t going to bother with our product. That’s the place where you first start correcting. Assume everyone reads. Lately people have been talking a lot about book deserts, places where there isn’t access – how do we encourage people to open bookstores in these communities?
What is going to be the role of American literature in the new political era? People keep saying we’re postfact, and I think that books are the special place where can go to understand the world we live in.
Although it’s never been easy for me to read, I do find it convenient. You basically carry a book and read it at will, which is fantastic for people like me who travel a great deal. I still read a lot of paper books, not because I don’t think e-reading is fantastic — I do — but because I don’t have to worry about plugging anything in or losing power and all that kind of thing when I have a paper book with me. -Excerpt from “The Books that Changed My Life” Edited by Bethanne Patrick.
Utopia, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Capital, Mein Kampf, Fauste, Arabian Nights, French Revolution, Hard Times, Don Quixote, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Gulliver’s travels, Frankenstein, I am Legend, Divine Comedy, Golden Bough, Ivanhoe, Shakespeare, Shakespeare, Illiad, From Russia with Love, Odyssey, Monte Christo, Thomas Pinchon, Arthur Koestler, The Roots of Coincidence, Bronowski, ~Magic Faraway Tree, Les ~Confessions de Redilience. *Note: In the film feature V’s most precious book is a Koran.
a book: a book about books 