3rd March 2012

Dear Books,

Thank you for the good years.  I have always loved you, kept you and held you as if you were pressed with diamonds.  I'm told I should lay you to rest but I'm finding it very difficult, and now I'm spending far too long in book shops, flicking through your pages and inhaling your woodiness.  I like those secondhand book places with shelves so close together you feel like you're in a cave, carved with a thousand stories.  But progress is knocking them down, one by one.  You can read about it...online

You're fast becoming extinct and I'm trying to hold onto you for a lifetime.  You and I, we are bound.  I shall never let you go.  You are to have and to hold.  

Apparently your e-rivals do the job but oh how they lack beauty!  I'm a romantic. I need a pile of books, a bunch of lavender, me dressed in crinoline and curled under a hideaway tree.  I can read you for hours and not be concerned that your battery will die.

Thank you real books.  I will always love you.

JoJo xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day so I never have to live without you.      - A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

Some of my diamonds: (in no particular order)

The Book Thief - Markus Zusak                                                                         Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier                                                                           To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Elegance of the Hedgehog - Muriel Barbery                                         The Riders - Tim Winton
A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway                                                         Cloudstreet - Tim Winton
Mr Rosenblum's List - Natasha Solomon                                                      The Turning - Tim Winton  
Sons and Lovers - D H Lawrence                                                                    Hotel New Hampshire - John Irving
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy                                                    The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath                         
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger                                         Winnie the Poo - A A Milne
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll                                     On The Road - Jack Kerouac
The Family from One End Street - Eve Garnett (a chidhood favourite)
White Teeth - Zadie Smith                                                                                 Possession - A.S. Byatt                          
The Autograph Man - Zadie Smith                                                        The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
On Beauty - Zadie Smith                                     The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Atonement - Ian McEwan                                  The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society - M.A Shaffer 
On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan                                                                
Enduring Love - Ian McEwan                                                                  

jojobee