I cooked a beef stew today. We call it Yum because it is so darned yummy. You simply can't stop eating it, and that is the way food should be. A good restaurant is one that you are dying to go back to. A good loaf of bread....Well, when we were in France, we bought a bread and that great butter of Normandy that were so great that, in spite of ourselves, we ate the whole loaf in one sitting. We soon went back to that bakery for more of the same, but they were closed for their fermature annuelle (annual closing for vacation), but we still remember that loaf of bread.
A good book should be like that. Having read it, you know that you will have to read it again—maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life. There are some novels that I have read over and over during my long lifetime. I first read Catcher in the Rye when I was sixteen, and several times thereafter. I found myself rereading it about a week before the news came that author J. D. Salinger had died. I have read Huckleberry Finn many times, each time finding something that I missed before. And the Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky (as well as his other major novels). I loved and was moved by Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, and have returned to it every few years. Salinger, Twain, Dostoyevsky, Hardy, and a number of others are FRIENDS OF MINE. I love to revisit them. Fielding, Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Walter Scott—irreplaceable lifelong friends. Who are your friends, and why?
Hey, the characters are my friends too. Holden, Huck, Dimitri—I really cared about them when I read their stories, and still do. Which characters did you befriend? To my thinking, a character is a failure if you don't feel for and care about him or her.
Some people have told me that they could read the Zan-Gah books again and again. That is a compliment that I treasure. And that they sympathized with the invented characters as if they were real. And that the book made them cry. Maybe I cried when I wrote them. Frankly I don't give a hoot for a book that doesn't get a tear out of you.
Or a beef stew that you don’t crave a second helping of.
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