The tangibility of literature

Hello, everybody, and happy new year!

Sorry it's taken so long for me to start writing.  Between packing for the upcoming move, taking the Jeopardy Online Test, and rehearsing for a play (and auditioning for another one) -- oh yeah, and the requisite 40 hours per week at work -- this week's been fairly busy. 

I have found time to indulge in one of my passions, however, and that is reading.  One of the great things about the written word is that it can transport you anywhere, to any place in time, and you feel like you know that world; that you belong -- nay, that you ARE part of that world.  Right now I have three books on the go:  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis (book two of the Chronicles of Narnia series, the whole of which is my bedside reading for the foreseeable future), The End of Your Life Book Club by Will Schwalbe (an autobiography about a man and his mother who being a sort of book club as it were, discussing their favorite works of literature while she undergoes chemo for Stage Four cancer), and most recently The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, which is in theatres as we speak.

Apparently there has been a slight rise in the amount of people reading thanks to e-readers and tablets.  While I'm thankful that people are able to indulge their imaginations in any way shape or form, there's still something about holding a book in your hand that's comforting.  And yes, slightly magical.  I realize that physically, it's one and the same no matter whether it's old-school or electronic.  The words on the page (or screen) are reaching your brain and stimulating the various imagination impulses.  I get that.  But holding those words in the palm of your hand, the touch and the smell and sheer tangibility of a bound and printed book is, for me at least, far superior.  It could be a paperback hot off the press, with that new book smell and a flashy movie-poster style cover.  It could be a musty old tome, one with thick pages that you know were bound before the age of mass-production, the ones whose pages from the side and top look almost corrugated, like the tops of the old potato chip bags we ate when we were children.  And the smell -- ah, the sweet heavenly smell when you open a book for the first time, having no idea where the journey will lead you but projecting a sense of serenity and trust in your new-found literary friend as you deeply inhale the wonders of the written word.  

The smell of a book that's been collecting dust on the shelves of a used bookstore or library for decades is a sensory treasure that's all-too rarely discovered these days.  And their covers, sometimes sun-dappled and cracked, sometimes damp and musty -- the gilt-edged hardbacks that have long-ago been stripped of their jackets (some may have never had any) -- all are a part of the wonderful physicality of reading.  Just as a mother protects its young, so too does the cover of a book; no matter how long it's been neglected by the rest of humanity, its story is there to be experienced by you and your imagination.  You possess it.  You live through its pages.  Many others have done so in the past, and many more will do likewise in the future, but for the time it takes to finish the tale, that story is yours and yours alone.  Its world is your world.  Its characters are your friends.  And just as the most important people and places in your life will always be with you, so too are your favorite books, with their characters and settings that stay with you forever.  They are, in a word, unforgettable.