I finally got a NEW book to read; we hit the AADL library last night.(Gotta get outta the Japanese cookbook rut I have been in.) Lately, I have been in kind of a HP review phase--re reading and listening to HBP and DH. My new buddy T. Pierce (whom I met in Chicago) suggested Holly Black's "Tithe" and it's accompanying series so I am looking at that again too but dude...I need a NEW book.
Looking at ten hours in the truck tomorrow...so when my email told me that the new book "Bottlemania" by Elizabeth Royte was ready for *ME* I hustled everybody's sorry asses into town. I also got two more tomes for me, The Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard du Boucheron (looks kinda Bernard Cornwell-ish but more...um...serious) and the third book I chose was The Temple of the Wild Geese & Bamboo Dolls of Echizen, looks like two novellas in a slim volume.
God I love books. There is something so visceral and so physical and so sensual, the smell of paper and ink, the heft and gravity of a well bound story. I like to hold books. I like wandering the stacks of a real library. I am home there. At the risk of boring you to tears dear ones, look at this quote from The Love of Books: the Philobiblon written by Richard de Bury (who is just a little older than my house!)
But the contemplation of truth is never more perfect than in books, where the act of imagination perpetuated by books does not suffer the operation of the intellect upon the truths that it has seen to suffer interruption. Wherefore books appear to be the most immediate instruments of speculative delight, and therefore Aristotle, the sun of philosophic truth, in considering the principles of choice, teaches that in itself to philosophize is more desirable than to be rich, although in certain cases, as where for instance one is in need of necessaries, it may be more desirable to be rich than to philosophize.
Moreover, since books are the aptest teachers, as the previous chapter assumes, it is fitting to bestow on them the honour and the affection that we owe to our teachers. In fine, since all men naturally desire to know, and since by means of books we can attain the knowledge of the ancients, which is to be desired beyond all riches, what man living according to nature would not feel the desire of books? And although we know that swine trample pearls under foot, the wise man will not therefore be deterred from gathering the pearls that lie before him. A library of wisdom, then, is more precious than all wealth, and all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it. Whoever therefore claims to be zealous of truth, of happiness, of wisdom or knowledge, aye, even of the faith, must needs become a lover of books.
