The Guardian Books Blog has an article today on books you couldn't put down once you started, in reference to an article in the Mirror about a man who had a panic attack after being locked in a library when he didn't notice it close, so absorbed was he in his reading.
There are lots of books I couldn't stop reading (most recently Kate Atkinson's excellent When Will There Be Good News?), but I can think of only a few instances of books randomly picked up in a library where I felt compelled to read to the end:
Anthem by Ayn Rand, which I found by accident in Grade Seven when we were given a library period to find a book for a book report. It was on one of those metal spinning racks alongside Gordon Korman paperbacks and copies of Island of the Blue Dolphins, masquerading as a regular sort of YA book. It had a lot going for it: a bleak dystopian future, and a forbidden love story --- the romance between Equality 7-2521 and Liberty 5-3000.
I should say that this is the only Ayn Rand I've ever read, and though I certainly found it compelling (it was completely different from anything I'd ever read before), it did not turn me into a little twelve-year-old Objectivist. At least, not that I know of...(*cue ominous music*)
And in high school I was at the Ottawa Public Library, getting books for a paper I had to write, when I started reading a collection of Pinter plays and stayed there for hours finishing it. I'd never heard of Pinter (this seems slightly appalling now, but I hope not terribly unusual), but I was fascinated by the brevity of the dialogue --- just the way it looked on the page -- though in retrospect I think my fascination was fueled in no small part by a major case of procrastination on the assignment I was there to research.
*The title of this post is a reference to a book that I had as a little kid:
Two sisters go in search of a bathroom during a blizzard and get locked in a library. I remember it being fantastically spooky! Not actually scary, but the delicious type of creepiness where you know it's only your imagination but knowing that barely helps stave off the panic.
No comments:
Post a Comment