![]() ![]() But also, the ghost of a phrase was eating at me. For one thing I did not wish to exit its atmosphere. I finished it and was immediately obliged to reread it. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is such a book. And then there is the type wherein the writer seems to infuse living energy into words as the reader is spun, wrung, and hung out to dry. There are the classic works monstrous and divine like Moby-Dick or Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus. Through the devotional culvert of memory, she looks back on a lifetime of reading and communes with the authors who most animated her inner life.Īfter finding herself under a monthlong spell of obsessively reading nothing but Haruki Murakami, Smith considers how great books bewitch the human spirit: ![]() Half a century after Susan Sontag extolled the rewards of rereading as rebirth, Smith journeys to the final resting places of great writers, photographing their tombstones and the ephemera that survived them - Virginia Woolf’s cane, Hermann Hesse’s typewriter, Robert Graves’s straw hat, Samuel Beckett’s spectacles - as she revisits her most beloved books. “Oh, to be reborn within the pages of a book,” Patti Smith exhales within the pages of M Train ( public library) - her astonishingly beautiful meditation on time, transformation, and how the radiance of love redeems the rupture of loss, embedded into which is an affectionate memoir of reading. ![]()
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