Books

I had a rather bombastic high-school English teacher. He vilified the word “nice.” He said that if you don’t like a book, don’t read it. He was emphatic that books are just manufactured items and not to be fawned over or worshipped, but read and thought about. He insisted on marking his place in a book by dog-earing pages or shoving his thumb in the binding and holding the book up in his arm pit. He insisted that not one physical aspect of any book mattered at all - unless the paginated volume was carried around and read at every opportunity until the binding fell apart, at which point, he said, the scattered arms and legs of said book should be gathered up, carefully put in order and carried about in an oatmeal carton – just as long as the concepts the book contained were read closely and completely and remembered.

Of course, since we were all eager to give our teacher friction and loop-hole him over his strong statements about books, he warned that none of the above applied if the book belonged to someone else.

He further warned that irregardless of the book’s ownership, we were obligated to remember.