I have been thinking things over about my feelings towards books and how there is a deep, underlined emotional response towards the way I look at books or at least there was when I was younger. As I have got older I have started to read more and feel like I have accomplished something when I get to the end of a book.
With this in mind, I have found myself looking at books in a more of a practical way. After all since I have been on this 3 year journey, I have accepted parts of who I am; my dyslexia being one of them and this has made me learn to be a lot more critical with myself. Early on into my first year I confronted myself and accepted, that I was going to have to do a lot of reading in this stage of my life and I knew it wasn’t going to be easy, but I knew that it needed to be done if I was to have any chance, of making it through the next 3 years. So I started to buy books that were short, only 150 or so pages and read them. This was to try and get into the habit of reading and become more comfortable around books and building myself up to the dreaded dissertation, (that I am happy to say was handed in last term) I feel that this plan helped me and I see books in a very different light, to what I did about 5 years ago.
So how have I changed the way I work considering books. I now understand there purpose and get the feeling of a book. I can even understand when people say “that new book smell” and over the last few years I have started to understand that turning the page. But we all have different feelings to the way a book should be treated. Some of us are very strict and feel that they should be kept in mint condition. Others think it is ok to jot notes down in the margin. I am happy to ‘dog ear’ a page and use it as a bookmark as to where I am.
I personally think it is ok to fold a page of a book and this got me thinking about how the book was not in perfect condition anymore and had become damaged in the process. This sparked off a new idea and I decided to destroy a book. The idea was to literally cut it in half.
This was the end result. Simple yet effective. The destroying of this book would set me onto a new path with my project.
