"Memory is talismanic."

I'm on the home straight with The Poisonwood Bible, so expect a report on that later in the week.  For today, as the publishing date of Stop What You're Doing And Read This! draws ever nearer, I shall tantalise you with another excerpt - this time from Jeanette Winterson.  Today's painting is Carl Larsson's 'Woman Reading'.  [EDIT: Pat, thanks for reminding me that the book is Radio 4's Book of the Week this week!]

"A medium other than the book could not achieve the effect of this book [The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd] nearly so well.  A book lets you follow a writer's mind.  Reading does not move in linear time in the way that a movie or even a radio piece does.  Of course there is a beginning, a middle and an end, but in 'good' books that is irrelevant.  We don't remember the books that have mattered to us by the chronology of their story-telling, but by the impression and effect of the story and of the language used to tell it.  Memory is talismanic.  We hold on to what we need and let the rest go.  Just as in our lives events separated in time sit side by side in memory, so the effect of a book is to let us live nearer to total time than linear time allows."

-- Jeanette Winterson, 'A Bed. A Book. A Mountain.'

Stop What You're Doing And Read This!