book nerding

quotes from my life with bob by pamela paul

"this is every reader's catch-22: the more you read, the more you realize you haven't read; the more you yearn to read more, the more you understand that you have, in fact, read nothing. there is no way to finish, and perhaps that shouldn't be the goal. the novelist umberto eco famously kept what the writer nassim taleb called an 'anti-library,' a vast collection of books he had not read, believing that one's personal trove should contain as much of what you don't know as possible."

"i wanted to crawl into the stacks and absorb the musty smell of decades-old paper. i riffled my fingers through the wooden card-catalog drawers like they were flip books, trying to decode them. i could be the first girl to master the dewey decimal system. i might one day know where every book stood. all i needed was some authority or at least some kind of officially sanctioned status. a few years after we'd moved to town, i mustered the courage to ask for a job.

'i'm sorry, there are no jobs available for children,' the librarian told me. i was ten.

'you wouldn't have to pay me,' i insisted, my eyes gleaming with what surely came across as an unhealthy fervor.

'that's okay, but thank you.'

the rejection was terrible. what was it that put the children's librarian off my candidacy? was it the you-don't-have-to-pay-me part? did she question my intentions? did she not see that i was a book person, different from other, more casual library visitors, that i cared? that i would never leave a book facedown with its spine splayed open like other kids my age. i couldn't help but feel they were taking me down a notch. 'this library isn't yours, you know,' is how i heard it."

"'when we have emotions of fear and pity toward the hero of a tragedy, we explore aspects of our own vulnerability in a safe and pleasing setting,' nussbaum observed. this not only allows us to access our own emotions it also enables us to cultivate empathy for others."