A Conundrum
Carnivore. Gourmand. Possibly a glutton. A trencherman.
Herbivore. A fruitarian. A gastronome. A bon vivant.
What about the person who consumes books? A bibliophile, a bookworm, occasionally smitten with bibliomania.
While I don't spend my days searching through bins of used books or online attempting to locate a rare volume or first edition, I am known to never leave a library without a book. Even when my bookmarks stick out of three or four books I can't pass up a book that catches my fancy.
Libraries intoxicate me, lure me with promises of undiscovered authors, opening sentences that wrap me up and force me to ask what now? I am entirely at the mercy of enticing titles.
Today I went into the library to take out one specific book—but in order to walk upstairs to the fiction section I needed to walk past the shelf of new non-fiction. Impossible. The books drew me in—flowers to the bee, nectar .
Yes. How could I pass up a book about a Mennonite woman who fell in love with a swaggering muscle bound man who worshipped at a Pentecostal church? ( I gleaned that from the inside cover).
Sometimes I yearn for a release from this penchant to bring home an armful of library books. But I do love all the possibilities they represent. At the moment —a decades old murder, a missing person not reported for two weeks, espionage in 1942, a book about the psalms, the Mennonite and the Pentecostal, and Doodling with Patterns.
The last book represents an enigma. To doodle is to scribble or scrabble, to reside in an unfocused state. Yet patterns exude structure, prototypes, models. Perhaps the book will allow me to bridge the gap between the set in stone pattern and the art emerging from the bending of the shapes.
The question: how to span, to cross—in both directions—in order to create something new. An embryonic creation.
If I didn't stop to scan the spines of books,take them out, skim or read them—I'd never ponder the most arresting questions.
Herbivore. A fruitarian. A gastronome. A bon vivant.
What about the person who consumes books? A bibliophile, a bookworm, occasionally smitten with bibliomania.
While I don't spend my days searching through bins of used books or online attempting to locate a rare volume or first edition, I am known to never leave a library without a book. Even when my bookmarks stick out of three or four books I can't pass up a book that catches my fancy.
Libraries intoxicate me, lure me with promises of undiscovered authors, opening sentences that wrap me up and force me to ask what now? I am entirely at the mercy of enticing titles.
Today I went into the library to take out one specific book—but in order to walk upstairs to the fiction section I needed to walk past the shelf of new non-fiction. Impossible. The books drew me in—flowers to the bee, nectar .
Yes. How could I pass up a book about a Mennonite woman who fell in love with a swaggering muscle bound man who worshipped at a Pentecostal church? ( I gleaned that from the inside cover).
Sometimes I yearn for a release from this penchant to bring home an armful of library books. But I do love all the possibilities they represent. At the moment —a decades old murder, a missing person not reported for two weeks, espionage in 1942, a book about the psalms, the Mennonite and the Pentecostal, and Doodling with Patterns.
The last book represents an enigma. To doodle is to scribble or scrabble, to reside in an unfocused state. Yet patterns exude structure, prototypes, models. Perhaps the book will allow me to bridge the gap between the set in stone pattern and the art emerging from the bending of the shapes.
The question: how to span, to cross—in both directions—in order to create something new. An embryonic creation.
If I didn't stop to scan the spines of books,take them out, skim or read them—I'd never ponder the most arresting questions.
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