I love collecting books simply cause the feel of the soft cover, colors, title engraved on the cover with metallic colors, the number of pages that makes it feel more wanted and the size of the text, preferably medium. It always caught my eyes watching my two brothers reading huge books of harry potter and so on, with the small font in small duration of time. That summarizes my love for collecting books. It never occurred to me even once on how they felt reading the whole book or what kept them going on.
One of the disturbing habits of my second brother was that once he's done reading a book, it simply goes for a toss. Even today, I never understood his logic spending so much on buying them and throwing them away, instead donate or give it away for good purpose. He's into the world of minimalist having the things he really wants.
On the other hand, it inspired me to pull up a bookshelf and collect books to make you look like a devoted reader, through my elder brother. He's so passionate about reading fictions and novels and I find it so hard to gift him a perfect book.
In fact, my side of it was a lie. My close friends knew me so well that I would only buy them and not read them. I either collect the books in and around my house, sometimes sneak few books from my dad's book collection or buy second-hand books. One of the best time of the year for books is December. Where St.Joseph's Church have their Christmas Bazaar and one of the best stalls that first catches my eyes are the books. They sell it for 5Dhs per book.
Who wouldn't have dreamt of such books that cost you the same price of a shawarma?
I have tried so hard to read the whole book but I end up reading about 10 pages and later it's like stars lost in my galaxy. I have even tried writing a book of my own simply cause my grandfather is a well-known writer and I feel I have tons of stories to be shared. Especially for a fact I love being there for my friends at their hard moments of life, helping them to see things different in life. That doesn't sum up to the fact that I'm successful or perfect in my life. I depend on sources around me to keep myself going on but easy to be in a third party role seeing problems simple to solve.
We're all humans, depending on others, looking out for clues that make them a better person, learn their fashion ideas, compare their lifestyle, decide a person rich or poor by the car or house they possess and it goes on.
I have recently started this book of Paulo Coelho, Like the flowing river. Honestly, I have tried my level best to read 'The Alchemist', one of the best-selling books. It never happened after few pages as usual. It does not convey for a fact that the book was boring or that bad to be kept aside. It's those moments you start on a good long vacation, let it be a week and then you make it a point to blame everything around you as the cause for losing track of the story.
I really couldn't help myself not to share the best preface I have ever read so far. I don't know about others but I always found the pages before chapter 1 has nothing to do with the whole book and it consumes more time and truly hopeless.
I hope you feel the same I read the following preface.
____________________________________________________________________________
When I was fifteen, I said to my mother: ‘I’ve discovered my vocation. I want to be a writer.’
‘My dear,’ she replied sadly, ‘your father is an engineer. He’s a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be a writer?’
‘Being someone who writes books.’
‘Your Uncle Haroldo, who is a doctor, also writes books, and has even published some. If you study engineering, you can always write in your spare time.’
‘No, Mama. I want to be a writer, not an engineer who writes books.’
‘But have you ever met a writer? Have you ever seen a writer?’
‘Never. Only in photographs.’
‘So how can you possibly want to be a writer if you don’t really know what it means?’
In order to answer my mother’s question, I decided to do some research. This is what I learned about what being a writer meant in the early 1960s:
(a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other disheveled, bespectacled writers. He says very ‘deep’ things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel and hates the one he has just published.
(b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into anage of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.
(c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of ‘most complicated book’: the one who wins will be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read.
(d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: ‘Einstein is a fool’, or ‘Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie.’ Everyone is scandalized, but they nevertheless go and tell other people that the theory of relativity is bunk and that Tolstoy was a defender of the Russian aristocracy.
(e) When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: ‘I’m a writer’, and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works.
(f) Given his vast culture, a writer can always get work as a literary critic. In that role, he can show his generosity by writing about his friends’books. Half of any such reviews are made up of quotations from foreign authors and the other half of analyses of sentences, always using expressions such as ‘the epistemological cut’, or ‘an integrated bi-dimensional vision of life’. Anyone reading the review will say: ‘What a cultivated person’, but he won’t buy the book because he’ll be afraid he might not know how to continue reading when the epistemological cut appears.
(g) When invited to say what he is reading at the moment, a writer always mentions a book no one has ever heard of.
(h) There is only one book that arouses the unanimous admiration of the writer and his peers: Ulysses by James Joyce. No writer will ever speak ill of this book, but when someone asks him what it’s about, he can’t quite explain, making one doubt that he has actually read it.
Armed with all this information, I went back to my mother and explained exactly what a writer was. She was somewhat surprised.
‘It would be easier to be an engineer,’ she said. ‘Besides, you don’t wear glasses.’
However, I did already have the untidy hair, a packet of Gauloises in my pocket, the script of a play under my arm (The Limits of Resistance, which, to my delight, a critic described as ‘the maddest thing I’ve ever seen on stage’); I was also studying Hegel and was determined, somehow or other, to read Ulysses. Then a rock singer turned up and asked me to write words for his songs, and I withdrew from the search for immortality and set myself once more on the same path as ordinary people.
This path took me to many places and caused me to change countries more often than I changed shoes, as Bertolt Brecht used to say. The pages that follow contain accounts of some of my own experiences, stories other people have told me, and thoughts I’ve had while traveling down particular stretches of the river of my life.
These stories and articles have all been published in various newspapers around the world and have been collected together at the request of my readers.
One of the disturbing habits of my second brother was that once he's done reading a book, it simply goes for a toss. Even today, I never understood his logic spending so much on buying them and throwing them away, instead donate or give it away for good purpose. He's into the world of minimalist having the things he really wants.
On the other hand, it inspired me to pull up a bookshelf and collect books to make you look like a devoted reader, through my elder brother. He's so passionate about reading fictions and novels and I find it so hard to gift him a perfect book.
In fact, my side of it was a lie. My close friends knew me so well that I would only buy them and not read them. I either collect the books in and around my house, sometimes sneak few books from my dad's book collection or buy second-hand books. One of the best time of the year for books is December. Where St.Joseph's Church have their Christmas Bazaar and one of the best stalls that first catches my eyes are the books. They sell it for 5Dhs per book.
Who wouldn't have dreamt of such books that cost you the same price of a shawarma?
I have tried so hard to read the whole book but I end up reading about 10 pages and later it's like stars lost in my galaxy. I have even tried writing a book of my own simply cause my grandfather is a well-known writer and I feel I have tons of stories to be shared. Especially for a fact I love being there for my friends at their hard moments of life, helping them to see things different in life. That doesn't sum up to the fact that I'm successful or perfect in my life. I depend on sources around me to keep myself going on but easy to be in a third party role seeing problems simple to solve.
We're all humans, depending on others, looking out for clues that make them a better person, learn their fashion ideas, compare their lifestyle, decide a person rich or poor by the car or house they possess and it goes on.
I have recently started this book of Paulo Coelho, Like the flowing river. Honestly, I have tried my level best to read 'The Alchemist', one of the best-selling books. It never happened after few pages as usual. It does not convey for a fact that the book was boring or that bad to be kept aside. It's those moments you start on a good long vacation, let it be a week and then you make it a point to blame everything around you as the cause for losing track of the story.
I really couldn't help myself not to share the best preface I have ever read so far. I don't know about others but I always found the pages before chapter 1 has nothing to do with the whole book and it consumes more time and truly hopeless.
I hope you feel the same I read the following preface.
____________________________________________________________________________
PAULO COELHO - LIKE THE FLOWING RIVER
____________________________________________________________________________When I was fifteen, I said to my mother: ‘I’ve discovered my vocation. I want to be a writer.’
‘My dear,’ she replied sadly, ‘your father is an engineer. He’s a logical, reasonable man with a very clear vision of the world. Do you actually know what it means to be a writer?’
‘Being someone who writes books.’
‘Your Uncle Haroldo, who is a doctor, also writes books, and has even published some. If you study engineering, you can always write in your spare time.’
‘No, Mama. I want to be a writer, not an engineer who writes books.’
‘But have you ever met a writer? Have you ever seen a writer?’
‘Never. Only in photographs.’
‘So how can you possibly want to be a writer if you don’t really know what it means?’
In order to answer my mother’s question, I decided to do some research. This is what I learned about what being a writer meant in the early 1960s:
(a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other disheveled, bespectacled writers. He says very ‘deep’ things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel and hates the one he has just published.
(b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into anage of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.
(c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of ‘most complicated book’: the one who wins will be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read.
(d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: ‘Einstein is a fool’, or ‘Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie.’ Everyone is scandalized, but they nevertheless go and tell other people that the theory of relativity is bunk and that Tolstoy was a defender of the Russian aristocracy.
(e) When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: ‘I’m a writer’, and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works.
(f) Given his vast culture, a writer can always get work as a literary critic. In that role, he can show his generosity by writing about his friends’books. Half of any such reviews are made up of quotations from foreign authors and the other half of analyses of sentences, always using expressions such as ‘the epistemological cut’, or ‘an integrated bi-dimensional vision of life’. Anyone reading the review will say: ‘What a cultivated person’, but he won’t buy the book because he’ll be afraid he might not know how to continue reading when the epistemological cut appears.
(g) When invited to say what he is reading at the moment, a writer always mentions a book no one has ever heard of.
(h) There is only one book that arouses the unanimous admiration of the writer and his peers: Ulysses by James Joyce. No writer will ever speak ill of this book, but when someone asks him what it’s about, he can’t quite explain, making one doubt that he has actually read it.
Armed with all this information, I went back to my mother and explained exactly what a writer was. She was somewhat surprised.
‘It would be easier to be an engineer,’ she said. ‘Besides, you don’t wear glasses.’
However, I did already have the untidy hair, a packet of Gauloises in my pocket, the script of a play under my arm (The Limits of Resistance, which, to my delight, a critic described as ‘the maddest thing I’ve ever seen on stage’); I was also studying Hegel and was determined, somehow or other, to read Ulysses. Then a rock singer turned up and asked me to write words for his songs, and I withdrew from the search for immortality and set myself once more on the same path as ordinary people.
This path took me to many places and caused me to change countries more often than I changed shoes, as Bertolt Brecht used to say. The pages that follow contain accounts of some of my own experiences, stories other people have told me, and thoughts I’ve had while traveling down particular stretches of the river of my life.
These stories and articles have all been published in various newspapers around the world and have been collected together at the request of my readers.
____________________________________________________________________________
Écrivain ou auteur ??
ReplyDeleteMais belle description qui jamais il est....