READ A GOOD BOOK LATELY?

摘要

I'm with Jorge Luis Borges: 'I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.' And Flaubert, who 'read in order to live'. While Jane Austen declared there was 'no enjoyment like reading', Hemingway found 'no friend as loyal as a book', and Frank Zappa had 'so many books, so little time'. Ray Bradbury reckoned that 'without libraries we have no past and no future', and Virginia Woolf 'ransacked public libraries and found them full of sunken treasure'. Germaine Greer saw the library as 'a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity' and Kurt Vonnegut praised librarians who 'staunchly resisted antidemocratic bullies who have tried to remove books from our shelves, and have refused to reveal to the thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles' when he declared 'the country I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries'. Even Keith Richards admitted: 'When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you.' For once, he was showing his age: both the church and the library have far less pull today.