War in a Bookstore

There are certain precautions one must take when stalking the aisles of a book store. It isn’t so simple as a stroll in the park or a saunter along some moonlit path. No. This is war. You’ve entered the most intimidating, the most intelligent, of battlefields. Ammunition? Your vernacular. Weapon? Your intuition. Tread lightly, soldier, for this is the Promised Land, a place only the brave, the scholarly, the passionate, dare walk. A place where vicious works of words try to trap you, attempt to enslave you, struggle to keep you pet. Stand your ground, and do not yield. For I have seen the horrors of the battlefield and I know, better than many, what one must do to survive. Pristine copies of the untouched unopened unused unhandled undiscovered unwanted unloved, novels stare at you. Menacing. Cold. Aloof. Do you dare try me? some seem to whisper. Do you dare open me, drown in the gentle caress of my words, smell my untainted pages and stroke my spine as though I’ll be yours, always and forever? This isn’t just war, my friends. This is a battle of the wits, a showdown of love. You are Odysseus, and these are your sirens, wooing and wishing you off course, steering you towards the inevitable doom all romance novels seem to promise. It’s the thrillers and mysteries now, rows and rows of yarn even Agatha Christie couldn’t find a way to untangle. Chaos and madness and the supernatural at every corner, every page turn. It’s unnerving. It’s appalling. It’s elementary. The poetry and classics are your next opponents. Strong they stand, full of weather-worn wisdom acquirable only from years and years of experience. They know the readers like you: starved of light, preying off the little warmth darkness has to offer. So it’s with the promise of the “Draught of Sunshine” and of “Blackberrying” in the summer they draw you in, expecting you to cast away all Sense and Sensibility for their petty promises of pleasure. But this is no game; a great Tempest, instead, waged by those guilty of empty promises and fulfillment. Once they leave, they are, after all, irreplaceable. At long last you have completed your mission. Left the Shire, left Winterfell, Hogwarts, the flat on Baker Street. Ignored all silly vices to attain the one thing you’ve needed most: a good book. And when that little girl clad in a pink jumper, left hand wrapped tightly around a shiny new copy of The Secret Garden gazes, with eyes bigger than the moon, at your own thick volume documenting the thirteen and a half lives of Captain Bluebear remember, that you were, too, that little girl once. That you too once eyed Watership Down with wariness, That the mere mention of a Bronte sister’s name was enough to make you wuther away into nothingness, You too once saw the minefield that is a book shop as an abyss, a place where readers from all backgrounds lose themselves in the madness that are words. Remember this and, as you turn to look at her, smile. For not everything need be a war in a book store.