“The Power of Literature: How Books Shape Our Lives and Souls”

The echo of the men’s night talk reaches the kitchen of the house cut with laughter. The book that marked me the most was The Catcher in the Rye. (Salinger), says one of the teens. They talk about school, literature, some sex. To me Tokio Blues, for the set sail (Murakami), provides another, sunk in the living room chair. When do the books we read begin to carve us?

The mother of Juan Forn, the remembered author of I will remember for you, began at a very young age to bind the books in blue leather that for some reason he wanted to keep. He kept them in a narrow little bookcase in his bedroom. But over the years, his son revealed, he was reducing the stock on those shelves: “He did it to insert between the spines of the books photos of the loved ones who are dying”. In the end, his sight was no longer enough to read, but he still kept those books because considered them part of his. And when he gave some to put the photos of his dead there, he also gave a little of his soul.

The unrepeatable experience of emptying and filling shelves is well accounted for by used book seller Shaun Bythell, a Scotsman who fulfilled his dream of opening his own bookstore. What he never imagined was that his job would end up turning his guts upside down. In diary of a bookseller He describes, for example, the day he has to go to pick up the belongings of a deceased couple without children. “You feel responsible for eliminating the last traces of the people who were one day. Dismantling his library is the final act of destroying his character.”, confess. And if. The collection of books that one leaves is sometimes the closest thing to a genetic inheritance.