I’m also reminded again how wonderful it is to get lost in a novel and how little I really need to spend on travel. The five books I picked up yesterday take me to London in the present, Paris in WW II, the Arctic in 1900 and the present, Australia 1945 and Japan 1943 and I can count on the coffee being consistently good wherever I am. Jeanette Winterson in her book Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal writes, “The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated. I wasn’t floating on my little raft in the present; there were bridges that led over to solid ground. Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need. Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture—exploit the new thing then move on. There’s a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imaginations. Reading is where the wild things are."
I have also of late been more committed to ordering books from the public library online service and browsing their shelves. What a gift.