Maybe this is just my subconscious making choices I’m not even consciously aware of, but there have been times where I’ll want to get into something (not always a book), and it felt as if the choice was already made before I actively made it.
In the context of books, I was sitting here thinking about what I want to read next, and was considering a bunch of books that seem dark and mysterious (Dracula, Slewfoot, Frankenstein, Six of Crows), and my indecision made me think of a scene I’ve heard from The Bell Jar about figs falling from a tree from indecision. And just like that, without me actually making the choice consciously, my mind latched onto The Bell Jar and I couldn’t shake it. Now I feel like I have to read it or it’ll just continue to bug me if I don’t. It’s like the book chose me, not the other way around. So I guess I’m reading The Bell Jar now.
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I think books definitely come to me at the right time. There will be times I get the notion that now is not right for this book or other times where a book I’ve heard of many times and am familiar with presents itself.
A couple cases from this year: Larry McMurty’s Lonesome Dove and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. I could have read either book at any point over the last couple decades, but I didn’t. If I had, they wouldn’t have impacted me the way they did when I read them this year.
Sometimes a book will follow me around for ages, is how I think of it. I’ll keep noticing it wherever I go (mostly because I go into any bookstore in my path); eventually I will be worn down by its persistence.
Sometimes a book will follow me around for ages, is how I think of it. I’ll keep noticing it wherever I go (mostly because I go into any bookstore in my path); eventually I will be worn down by its persistence.
I’ve had this with movies, ironically it’s fight club. It’s also a book so…
I stumbled on a book through Goodreads that intrigued me greatly.
A few weeks later Im at a used bookstore that is notorious for, shall I say, a very loose and fluid organizational style. Down a little corridor and under a stack of books there it was
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis
The perfect book. The best damn I’ve ever read. And the one I’m taking with me when we all move to Mars.
You couldn’t decide. You remembered hearing about a passage about indecision. You then wanted the book with that passage. Nothing remotely unusual in that. (And neither is it remotely like the time I was in a bookshop and a large book in the ‘art’ section showed that it chose me by materialisng in my shopping bag. Now that was unusual.)
I call it the magic of the book witch.