Conversations

She understood that when a book spoke to you, you wanted to speak back.

Alice Hoffman, The Invisible Hour

I like this idea of a book as a conversation. Sometimes it can be a one-way conversation, like when you are stuck with someone who won't stop talking long enough for you to get a word in. Yet when a book speaks to you, as Alice Hoffman suggests, you feel compelled to speak back, even if your contribution is only in your mind.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

In Hoffman's novel, her main character is smitten by The Scarlet Letter and gets the opportunity to go back in time to actually speak with the author, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Most of us aren't lucky to talk with the author, even an author who is still living, so we must find other ways to keep up our end of the conversation.

Underlining passages may be one way. When you underline words in a book, you make the statement that this is meaningful to you. It is something you would like to remember. Some people even go so far as to write their own comments in the margins of their books.

One of the secrets of book clubs, other than the appeal of getting together with like-minded people, is to express our views about the books we read.

The compulsion to speak back is the motivation for this blog. When I read a book, I usually want to talk about it. Chances are the author isn't around to speak with, nor are other people who have read the same book recently. And so I write about the books I have read.

And The Invisible Hour is a book I have been writing about for several days now. Obviously it is a book that spoke to me.