Apologizing to Dogs by Joe Coomer

This is a passage that describes Mazelle, the owner of Mazelle's Rare and Medium Rare Books.

Mazelle began to buy books because she liked reading them, but as the years and decades turned she understood that they were merely objects to be bought and sold. Books were too small to contain lives, always promised more and realized less. Her own life was an example. What book approached its audacity, its scale, its hidden grandeur, its intricacy, its depths of emotions, its level of sin? None, and none ever would. Searching for a life in a book was like looking for a house in a keyhole. She'd stopped reading and taken up the tending of her children. Books were only valuable to people who hadn't yet come to her understanding and only then when they hadn't been read. So people sold the books they'd finished cheaply and paid dearly for those they hadn't. Mazelle had placed herself in the middle. She looked at her profession as that of a dealer to addicts. She knew her customers would return. Only those readers whose lives became larger than fiction could break the habit.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars






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