I LOVE Books about Books…

This one will be quick – I just finished reading a most delightful book, Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley, and felt compelled to say something about it… What – you’ve never heard of Christopher Morley, you say? I hadn’t either – stumbled upon him in one of those “you might like…” tags on Amazon. Shameless bit of promotion here: I LOVE AMAZON. I know that’s not fashionable, in many circles, but I don’t care. They make reading easier for me, they make shopping easier for me, and thanks to Alexa they make organizing my life easier for me – what’s not to love?? Anyway, that was a totally detour – back to books and Christopher Morley. You may not have heard of him because he wrote in the early 1900s. And he didn’t write thrillers or blockbusters – he wrote beautifully crafted stories about lovely people and the things they cared about. And in this particular book – Parnassus on Wheels – that thing is books. (I’m usually emphatically not a wikipedia fan, unless I want a very quick-and-dirty explanation of pop culture, but I actually liked their description of the book – particularly since Amazon was unusually short on description in the link I pulled originally… Thank goodness for the free sample option, or I would have missed this one altogether!)

You know I love books. I also love books about books – I like the self-reinforcing nature of reading what other people like reading. There are a surprising number of people who must feel the same way, since there are a surprising number of books about books and reading. The topic deserves a top ten at a minimum, but I will have to save that for another day – I’m about due for some reading myself tonight… 🙂

This is a positive delight of a story – a short but oddly weighty tale about a woman who discovers her love of books and book lovers in a highly amusing and thoroughly entertaining journey of discovery and reflection that doesn’t read like you’d expect a story about discovery and reflection to read. It has beautiful, real, characters and a lively protagonist that you’re going to love. The story is sweet, there are pearls of life lessons teased throughout, but it never feels heavy-handed. Overall it’s simply lovely and I can’t say enough good things – you’ll just have to look for yourself. I will tease a bit with a few of my favorite quotes though, just to make sure you’re as curious as you ought to be… Definitely look this one up – and it’s sequel, The Haunted Bookshop, is on my kindle as we speak and promises to be quite as delightful as the first book, hooray! 🙂

“Judging by the way you talk,” I said, “you ought to be quite a writer yourself.”
“Talkers never write. They go on talking.”

I have always suffered from the feeling that it’s better to read a good book than to write a poor one; and I’ve done so much mixed reading in my time that my mind is full of echoes and voices of better men. [NB: HOW TRUE IS THIS, btw?? Not that I’m feeling compelled to justify why I haven’t been doing any of my own writing or anything, teehee…]

…all the great things in life are done by discontented people.

I think reading a good book makes one modest. When you see the marvellous (sic) insight into human nature which a truly great book shows, it is bound to make you feel small – like looking at the Dipper on a clear night, or seeing the winter sunrise when you go out to collect the morning eggs. And anything that makes you feel small is mighty good for you.

…nobody knows anything about literature unless he spends most of his life sitting down.

Summer was over, and we were no longer young, but there were great things before us.

Not bad for a book with barely 125 pages, eh?? CHECK IT OUT!