the random read

"If you cannot read all your books, at any rate handle, or as it were, fondle them -- peer into them, let them fall open where they will, read from the first sentence that arrests the eye, set them back on the shelves with your own hands, arrange them on your own plan so that you at least know where they are. Let them be your friends; let them at any rate be your acquaintances." - Winston Churchill

I love the anticipation of surprise in the random read. I have a large bookshelf of books I've read, books I want to read, books I think I should own (just in case they go out of print and every copy but the copy I've saved is consumed by rabid swarms of book-eating locus). It's one of my favorite pastimes to flip through a book that's been on my mind. I turn to a page, letting my eyes pour over the words until a passage strikes my fancy. I rarely read more than a page, placing the book back carefully in its proper place. I find great comfort in knowing it will be there for me when I feel the urge to visit it again. I suppose it might be like a foodie stopping by Whole Foods just to walk the isles, picking out an interesting jar of this or that or handling a ripe fruit, taking in a good, long sniff of the produce, and placing it back on the shelf or in the bin. Or the wine aficionado at a wine tasting.

Random reads for your pleasure:

From Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham

"'I remember when first I went to Paris, Clutton, I think it was, gave a long discourse on the subject that beauty is put into things by painters and poets. They create beauty. In themselves there is nothing to choose between the Campanile of Giotto and a factory chimney. And then beautiful things grow rich with the emotion that they have aroused in succeeding generations. That is why old things are more beautiful than modern. The Ode to a Grecian Urn is more lovely now than when it was written, because for a hundred years lovers have read it and the sick at heart take comfort in its lines.'"

From The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

"The rain had stopped. The air now drove out of southeast, broken overhead into blue patches. Upon the crest of a hill beyond the trees and roofs and spires of town sunlight lay like a pale scrap of cloth, was blotted away. Upon the air a bell came, than as if at a signal, other bells took up the sound and repeated it."

Time for one more? Yes?
Yes.
Always time for one more.

From Jazz by Toni Morrison

"Girls can do that. Steer a man away from death or drive him right to it. Pull you out of sleep and you wake up on the ground under a tree you'll never locate again because you're lost. Or if you do find it, it won't be the same. Maybe it cracked from the inside, bored through by crawling life that had to have its own way too, and just crept and bunched and gnawed and burrowed until the whole thing was pitted through with the service it rendered to others. Or maybe they cut it down before it crashed in on itself. Turned it into logs for a fire in a big hearth for children to gaze into."

Ah, the random read. Always a surprise and delight waiting in the turn of a page.