You date an illiterate girl.

I came across this little epitaph a while ago and felt it was important enough to share on my blog:

– You Should Date An Illiterate Girl, Charles Warnke
"Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you."

Biblophile

Even though I have been drowning in a sea of unrelenting school work, I still cannot keep my mind from wandering two months two months into the future where I will be free of German and in the great state of Georgia! I love it there. Last year it snowed. I took so many pictures of a sparse covering of white loveliness I was so excited!
I have problem when I go anywhere that my books are not; I try to take them all with me. I have been learning to pack lighter because I get made fun of for how much I take with me... most of the mass being books and shoes. How can you ever take just one?! And I'm always reading more than one book at a time: different books for different moods. Words are like music to me. I have to be in the mood to deal with turmoil and war and emotional distress and happiness and gaiety and love. I have to be in the mood to be in Russia with Anna, I have to be in the mood to be with Ernest in Paris, I have to be in the mood to think with Ayn. I am an emotional being and I want the things that I do and surround myself with to reflect how I am feeling.

The only problem is I am trying to find the one book that I will begin and finish this winter break. I am a slow reader with a proliferation of books that have perfect spines and unbent pages. So who am I going to go with?!? Who will come with me? Will it be Rosamond Lehmann? Joyce? Tolstoy? Austen? Auden? Rand? Hemmingway? Fitzgerald? WHO WILL I TAKE?! It is oft too much to bear. I am like a mother unable to pick a favorite... (But I am leaning towards Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets)