Found in a Bookshop

by Stephanie Butland

They both have the same quote from Mansfield Park tattooed around their left wrists: ‘Every moment has its pleasures and its hope.’

But when your brain gets old you make mistakes. And bits of your body start to ache and go wrong and it’s hard not to feel that you’re not what you were.’

Readers know that, when their heart hurts with loss or absence, then a book that they have read before can lessen the ache. Readers, faced with a new experience, find a book to help them navigate: a travel guide to a new city, say, but also a novel set there.

Yes you can. Books don’t judge you. Books can contain, and invoke, every feeling that there is. Books can bring you to rage or tears or happiness or all three, in quick succession. Books can have such a profound effect on your emotions that they can change the course of your life.

This is how books work. They take what’s in them, and add what’s in you, and the interface, more often than not, leads to picking up that book every chance you get. Sometimes the power is so great that you’re up all night;

Sometimes, you do not care enough to want to read on. This is something that books understand. That writers understand. That other readers understand. It’s a fact of life. All foodies do not love bananas.

Reading should be a pleasure and a joy, an education and a promise, a release and an escape. The books you choose for yourself should never, ever feel like a punishment or a chore.

about how you can tell if someone is guilty of a crime because when you arrest them and put them in a cell they are calm. They know it’s over. They might deny everything when they’re confronted, but when the door is locked and they are alone, they sit and wait. It’s the innocent who pace and rage in a holding cell, who cry and protest regardless of whether anyone is watching or listening.

Good people make bad choices.