Today is #WorldBookDay, so here’s a little thread to remind you why you should BEWARE OF BOOKS. Firstly, they take over your house. They climb up your hallway. Looming over you like they own the place.
Naturally they come swaggering into your study. Like they own the place.
Even when you try to go to bed, they follow you. The ones you’ve read. The ones you’re still reading. The ones you were supposed to be reading but haven’t yet read because some other books have come up to take their place. How dare they? They’re insatiable and SO demanding
Go into your daughter’s room and you’ll find them. The ones she read as a kid and still loves. The ones she read as a teenager. The ones she read recently when she was at home. There’s no escaping them.
Sometimes you try. You watch tv. You’re on Twitter. But the books are always there in the background, conspiring. Talking to each other even when they haven’t found a way to you, Because, as Elias Canetti once wrote
No wonder some people are so afraid of books that they burn them. Books can get into your head. And fill peoples heads with ideas that some people don’t want them to have.
And sometimes burning books isn’t enough. Sometimes governments and people will kill the people who write books and the people who translate them.
But the books will survive. Even when their authors are killed. Because, as #RuthOzeki observed
And so many readers have accepted that invitation. And filled their heads with dreams, ideas and aspirations that once upon a time were supposed to be above their station.
That’s why they fill our houses. It’s why we have libraries filled with books that help connect the present to the past, one generation to the next.
And in a burning world books connect us to the future. They provide lights that help us grow, and make us see, and teach us to understand what other people think and feel and consider how we might connect with them, and find our way out of the mess we’re in.
That’s why I’m telling you. BEWARE OF BOOKS. They will change you. They will take you to places you might never have been to and might never go to. They are part of the conversation that we are always having and should always be having, about who we are and where we
might be going. And that’s a conversation that never ends, even in these times when so much seems so hopeless and it sometimes seems like we aren’t going anywhere.
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