I've had the sort of day that is only splendid for my kind of people - the ones who hopelessly crave new words. New phrases. New people caught in paper-thin slices of life. And above all else, new stories. All the afternoon I've whiled away, with fresh cups of vanilla tea and caramel cappuccinos, working through a tottering stack of half-read novels, Daughter and John Mayer and The Paper Kites filling up the endless rustle of paper and caffeine-laced swirls of rising steam.
There are the guilty pleasures - paperback copies of Lee Child and Tom Clancy, with worn, cracked spines, purchased secondhand from a town over. The plot is rich, tight in its lack of verbosity. The hero is always a redeemable cynic, the villains are always truly evil, the American western is reinvented, while holding true to its clearly demarcated camps of black and white.
There is a treasured, just found copy of Fragile Things, its jacket retaining its new-book-sheen; the paper, clean, crisp, untouched by that sweet rotting scent of old books. Neil Gaiman writes short stories with featherlight touches; jade brilliant and incisive in his prose. The memory-scent of incense and promise and wonderment rises tangibly from its pages, the mark of a fine author.
There are slim, hardback volumes of the old classics - G. K. Chesterton writes essays faintly reminiscent of Borges, of libraries and maps and possibilities. Orwell recounts the many tumultuous events at Animal Farm; the unrest and dissatisfaction and wrongness suffered at the whims of dictatorship don't let me read for very long. The book is snapped shut; tea - now cold - is sipped.
The setting light of the sun reflects against the steel-and-glass of a neighbouring building, and shines into my room. The air is tinted golden. I leave for another cup of tea.
When I return, with a lightly brewed coffee instead, the light is fast fading. The rug is soft under me. Sun Tzu's Art of War sits on the bottom shelf, incriminating, demanding to be read. Its voice is difficult to ignore, but Robert Jordan's is insistent, insidious. A copy of the first book in the Wheel of Time sits among younger, newer brothers, the dog-eared edition published well before I was around, its pages so worn and brown they seem to have stories to tell of their own.
The words are familiar - the medieval archaisms repeated in Tolkien and Paolini's sagas, in the Riders of Pern and the Westerosi, across the breadth of Narnia and the amongst the elders of the Seelie courts. There are mages and sorcerers and wizards; dragons are rode and great battles are fought. Empires topple, kingships exchange hands, and through it all, the war of good and evil fight in a blinding, bloodstained tapestry.
And then the coffee is drained, and the book is read. Not completed, not yet, but enough. Enough, I think, for the day. Tomorrow will bring another tale, and we will await, nestled in soft blankets and fading light, and hope for the honor to bear witness to many lives, many deaths, many in-betweens.
