From YA Highway Road Trip Wednesday #130: It takes about 12 hours to read a book, but the book spends a lot more time than that in the home, as a doorstop, a place to hide jewelry, even an old-fashioned petal press. Is there anything you do with books before/after you’ve read them?
I love the Road Trip question this week, because I’m a chronic book re-reader, so I keep the books I love very close.
But when I really, really love a book, I also buy a copy to give to the person who MUST read said book. So when my now-husband and I moved in together, we wound up with quite a few duplicates. Just one example is NORWEGIAN WOOD, the fantastic love story by one of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami.
This book is full of memories of True Love to me, and I still pick it up and re-read the same scene I read back then to my then auditioning-to-be-boyfriend:
So I made up my mind I was going to find someone who would love me unconditionally three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
The scene goes on to describe an act we began to call “strawberry-shortcaking,” whereby a boy brings a girl strawberry shortcake because she asks for it, but when she changes her mind when he arrives with it, and he’s OK with this because he’d do anything for her. The clincher is of course that it must be mutual for it to be True Love, and thus our theory of “mutual strawberry-shortcaking” was born.
And now we have two well-worn copies of Norwegian Wood on our shelf. Not bad, Mr. Murakami.
Kip Wilson is a freelance writer from Boston, MA. She earned her Ph.D. in German from SUNY Albany, and has lived in both Germany and Austria. She is a regular contributor to FACES magazine for children, and loves traveling to new places and writing about them. Some of her favorite topics include language, food, history, and travelling with small children.
