The short story writer, Anthony Doerr, discusses his love of books with nwbooklovers.org.
From the piece...
Indeed, every book on my shelves is a key to a little vault of memories. Here a boy in an egg-blue suit handed me an ornate invitation to a party at Jay Gatsby’s; here I met the harpooner Queequeg at the Spouter Inn; here I floated a stretch of the Mississippi with a slave named Jim.
We live through life, but we live through art, too. And in art, as in life, nothing is generalized. No one thing is a copy of the next. Everything is individual.
Look, Earth is four and a half billion years old. The rocks in your backyard are moving, if only you could stand still enough to watch. How are we supposed to measure the brief, warm, intensely complicated fingersnap of our lives against the absolutely incomprehensible vastness of the universe?
How? We stare into the fire. We turn to friends, bartenders, lovers, priests, drug-dealers, painters. And we turn to books.
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