You should be into friends who send books.

I have a friend, surprising I know.

He is smarter and wiser than I and for some undue reason gives some of his time to be my friend. He lives in a different city so we only see each other from time to time, but I owe him a lot in terms of who I am and the interests I have. Therefore seeing him is a treat and second to seeing him is speaking with him on the phone. Always an enlightening and exciting experience for he is humorous, intelligent and terribly entertaining in conversation. He leads conversations with ease and has such extraordinarily robust recall of knowledge, coupled with highly original points of view and perspective giving his even most relaxed comments a truly illuminating grace.

So, yeah, I look up to him and hope to gain a little of what he has got. Which is always, like many of life’s great things, impossible to define.

Recently we chatted. And you’ll be glad to know, we will be meeting up soon by chance which is a situation where I would use the word, Terrific. From this conversation, which covered an extraordinary amount of ground, he said he’d send books.

And only one short week later I received a ramshackle package with two books in it. One, now that I’ve read it, was a contemporary novel originally written in French. Not usually my cup of tea, and even though I sort of muscled my way through, I found it difficult to put down. Many of the topics in this book were identical to ideas we had discussed in our last conversation and for this reason the book gained a sort of extra illumination. My feeling in taking in any experience is that timing is always absolutely crucial.

The second book which I have just started came with a note that read “I’ve never regretted buying this book”. I can see why, I couldn’t get to sleep the night before last for the difficulty of putting it down!

Now, I guess what I’m saying is “make friends with people who are smarter and more interesting people than yourself”. Make sure they are perceptive and can select and recommend books, films, paintings, poems, people and/or anything else that actually suits you, so you can tell they have indeed thought about you when recommending any of these things. This is opposed to someone who just thinks about themselves in recommending things that only they like (which in case anyone is paying attention, is exactly what I do).

And then make sure they send you books. Used books that arrive in the mail from a distant friend is akin to receiving a tax refund… it comes in the mail, you are aware of it but not really knowing whether its real, you are conflicted and excited and when it does finally arrive the joy is overwhelming.

I have not ever received a tax refund.

Be into books in the mail from friends.

Amazon is not a friend.

BG