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" No matter how beautiful the paper, artwork, printing, and binding, I'm seldom drawn to a book unless it's by a writer I care about or on a subject that appeals to me. "
Michael Dirda
Me
Care
Paper
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" I once read that there are more biographical works about Napoleon Bonaparte than any other man in history. "
Michael Dirda
Man
History
Than
" While Napoleon believed his fortunes to be governed by destiny, his real genius lay in self-control and martial daring coupled with an indomitable will to power. "
Michael Dirda
Power
Destiny
Will
" To an Ohio boy, it represented world-weary Gallic shrugs and Gauloises cigarettes, existentialist thinkers in berets and Catherine Deneuve in nothing at all - French was the language of intellectual power and effortless sex appeal. "
Michael Dirda
Language
Intellectual
Boy
" I haven't read for pleasure in 35 years. I mean, I get a lot of pleasure from what I read... For me, it's gotten so that it doesn't seem as though I've read a book unless I've written about it. It really seems the completion of the reading process. "
Michael Dirda
Process
Years
Reading
" I love the look of books published by the firm of Rupert Hart-Davis: They strike me as handsome, elegant, and inviting. I'll pick up almost anything with that imprint, especially if it's in a jacket or priced low. "
Michael Dirda
Love
Me
Look
" Reading books might itself be a bit weird, but obviously okay, since books were part of school, and doing well in school was clearly a good thing. But comics were more like candy, just flashy wrappers without any nourishment. Cheap thrills. "
Michael Dirda
Good
Weird
Reading
" It's a sad commentary on our time - to use a phrase much favored by my late father - that people increasingly celebrate Christmas Day by going to the movies. "
Michael Dirda
Movies
Father
Day
" My gift, if that's not too grandiose a term, is one for describing novels, biographies, and works of history in such a way that people want to read them. "
Michael Dirda
People
Gift
Way
" I'm an appreciator. I love all kinds of books, and I want others to love them, too. "
Michael Dirda
Books
Others
To Love
" In my own case, my folks didn't actually object to comics, as many parents did, but they pretty much felt the things were a waste of time. "
Michael Dirda
Own
My Own
Parents
" A personal library is a reflection of who you are and who you want to be, of what you value and what you desire, of how much you know and how much more you'd like to know. "
Michael Dirda
Know
Library
Reflection
" From the late 19th to the early 20th century, the December issue of almost any general-interest magazine regularly featured a holiday horror or two. "
Michael Dirda
Horror
Early
Two
" For those of us with an inward turn of mind, which is another name for melancholy introspection, the beginning of a new year inevitably leads to thoughts about both the future and the past. "
Michael Dirda
Mind
Past
Beginning
" Because of Kipling, I've sometimes wondered about keeping a mongoose about the house. But given the cobra population in Silver Spring, Maryland - zero, when last I checked - we hardly need a Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. "
Michael Dirda
House
Spring
Sometimes
" Near my desk, I keep a large plastic carton filled with fresh notebooks and stationery of various kinds, sizes, and qualities. "
Michael Dirda
Fresh
Desk
Keep
" I don't like gross monetary inequities. I firmly believe that the wrong people and the wrong professions are being rewarded, and rewarded absurdly, and that the hardest work the obscenely rich do is ensuring that they preserve their privileges, status symbols, and bloated bank accounts. "
Michael Dirda
Bank
Wrong
Rich
" For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire. "
Michael Dirda
Enlightenment
Three
Person
" I've been slightly obsessed with paper and notebooks. Among my most precious possessions is a small light-blue, breviary-sized volume - four-and-a-half inches wide, seven inches tall - made by a company called Denbigh. "
Michael Dirda
Precious
Small
Tall
" Digital texts are all well and good, but books on shelves are a presence in your life. As such, they become a part of your day-to-day existence, reminding you, chastising you, calling to you. Plus, book collecting is, hands down, the greatest pastime in the world. "
Michael Dirda
Life
Hands
Book
" On any given day, I'm likely to be working at home, hunched over this keyboard, typing Great Thoughts and Beautiful Sentences - or so they seem at the time, like those beautifully flecked and iridescent stones one finds at the seashore that gradually dry into dull gray pebbles. "
Michael Dirda
Time
Home
Gray
" Sometimes the very best of all summer books is a blank notebook. Get one big enough, and you can practice sketching the lemon slice in your drink or the hot lifeguard on the beach or the vista down the hill from your cabin. "
Michael Dirda
Best
Beach
Hot
" When I was a boy in the late 1950s, the public library refused to stock books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were regarded as vulgar, ill-written potboilers. "
Michael Dirda
Books
Boy
Library
" Writers keep writing and publishers publishing - it never grows boring. "
Michael Dirda
Boring
Writing
Publishing
" Many people know that Shakespeare's dramatic 'canon' was established in 1623 by the publication of the so-called First Folio. That hefty volume contained thirty-six plays. "
Michael Dirda
Dramatic
Know
First
" Born in 1910, Wilfrid Thesiger spent his childhood in Ethiopia, or Abyssinia, as it was then called, where his father was an important and much-admired British official. "
Michael Dirda
Father
Important
Then
" Books can be a source of solace, but I see them mainly as a source of pleasure, personal as well as esthetic. "
Michael Dirda
Pleasure
Personal
See
" I think of my own work as part of a decades-long conversation about books and reading with people I will mainly never meet. "
Michael Dirda
People
Meet
Own
" Late summer is perfect for classic mysteries - think of Raymond Chandler's hot Santa Anas and Agatha Christie's Mediterranean resorts - while big ambitious works of nonfiction are best approached in September and early October, when we still feel energetic and the grass no longer needs to be cut. "
Michael Dirda
Think
Best
October
" In my younger days, I used to visit record shops and covet boxed sets of Beethoven symphonies, Wagner operas, Bach cantatas, Mozart piano concertos. Only rarely was I able to find the money for such luxuries. "
Michael Dirda
Piano
Days
Find
" In truth, my Anglophilia is fundamentally bookish: I yearn for one of those country house libraries, lined on three walls with mahogany bookshelves, their serried splendor interrupted only by enough space to display, above the fireplace, a pair of crossed swords or sculling oars and perhaps a portrait of some great English worthy. "
Michael Dirda
Great
Enough
Truth