About Shelf Love

When you open a book,’ the sentimental library posters said, ‘anything can happen.’ This was so. A book of fiction was a bomb. It was a land mine you wanted to go off. You wanted it to blow your whole day. Unfortunately, hundreds of thousands of books were duds. They had been rusting out of everyone’s way for so long that they no longer worked. There was no way to distinguish the duds from the live mines except to throw yourself at them headlong, one by one. – Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

We are two friends who have shared books with each other for more than 20 years, and Shelf Love is our joint record of our individual reading journeys. We read books old and new, famous and obscure, and all manner of books in between. Some books will indeed be live mines that blow us away, and others will be duds that leave us cold. Many will be a little bit of both. In every case, we use this space to share exactly what we thought and to extend our long-running bookish conversation to others. Come read over our shoulders!

Contact Jenny at jbrown14464 at yahoo dot com.

Contact Teresa at shelfloveteresa at gmail dot com.

Thanks for your interest in Shelf Love!

More Thoughts on Reading

This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature considered as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own. They are not, any more than our personal experiences, all equally worth having. Some, as we say, ‘interest’ us more than others. The causes of this interest are naturally extremely various and differ from one man to another; it may be the typical (and we say ‘How true!’) or the abnormal (and we say ‘How strange!’); it may be the beautiful, the terrible, the awe-inspiring, the exhilarating, the pathetic, the comic, or the merely piquant. Literature gives the entree to them all. Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous exten­sion of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself; and therefore less a self; is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee; more gladly still would I per­ceive the olfactory world charged with all the infor­mation and emotion it carries for a dog.

Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do. — C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism