Read by my mother before bed. The first stories I can recall.
Hand-me-down from my older brother.
First in a set. I have them all. We bought them from gas stations.
Where's Waldo, in french.
First one I bought. Was reading it in a store when a clerk yelled at me because "this is not a library", so I bought it.
Mystery, an extension of my interests in Tintin, naturally.
More Mystery.
Grade 10 required reading. English as a second language.
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
Read as a teen, sitting in a lazy boy in our basement, mid-summer-vacation, over 3-4 days.
“Come on back and we’ll see if you remember the simplest thing of all – how it is to be children, secure in belief and thus afraid of the dark.”
"All this happened, more or less"
Read to me during a road trip.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past.”
“Suppose we received from another planet a message made up of pure facts, facts of such clarity as to be merely obvious: we wouldn't pay attention, we would hardly even notice; only a message containing something unexpressed, something doubtful and partially indecipherable, would break through the threshold of our consciousness and demand to be received and interpreted.”
“When I open them, most of the books have the smell of an earlier time leaking out between the pages - a special odor of the knowledge and emotions that for ages have been calmly resting between the covers. Breathing it in, I glance through a few pages before returning each book to its shelf.”
“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”