I think books must be the creatures God didn't make, so we could make them ourselves. Creatures?, you ask dubiously. No, you're right. I don't like that classification either. They are more like souls. Yes, souls with superior memories, holding onto thousands of years of history and millions of people's thoughts that would have died with their owners had they not been preserved between the pages of books. Books are souls that can inspire and arouse a full range of human emotion--laughter, tears, anger, peace, a desire to change. They can open your soul and contain parts of it too.
"'Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times?' Mo had said...'As if something were left between the pages every time you read it. Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells. . .and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower. . .both strange and familiar.'"*
Books are not souls you say? Maybe not like yours and mine. Maybe books don't live, or breathe, or think. . .but they help us to live and cause us to think. No, not souls on their own, perhaps, but pieces of the readers who lent their souls to the pages.
*Inkspell, by Cornelia Funke
