When I worked part-time in a local bookstore at my early age -- so easily - pictured, if you do not work in one, as a kind of paradise where not only one read his own favorite books but also encounter charming young ladies (one of my personal fantasies) who browse eternally among Toni Morrison or Ernest Hemingwast thing that chiefly struck me was that really bookish people are a rarity, there are vast numbers of those who consider themselves to be such. Often they will introduce themselves when they enter the bookshop 'book people' and insist on telling you that 'we love books'. They will wear T-shirts or carry bags with slogans explaining exactly how much they think they adore books. It is clear that the way they dress themselves is quite similar to that of us bookish people, but that is the similarities between them and us begin and end. And (sure) means of identifying them is that they never, ever buy books.
These days it is so rare that I find time to read that, when I do, it feels like indulgence, more so than any, other sensory experience. When an important relationship in my twenties (break) up the only thing I could do was to read, and I amassed a pile of books I sank and escaped from the world around me and inside me. The landscapes of Yu Hua, Wang Shou, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Harper Lee and others protected me from my own thoughts, which were pushed into the background, where could silently process without bothering me. I created a physical wall on my desk, (make) from the books, and as I read them the wall slowly came down until it was gone.
In a more real sense, books are the best way in which one enriches his own life and the enormous numbers of them out there in the world excite me, especially when I visit second-hand bookstores with no intention (search) for a certain book. It is like casting a net and never knowing what you will find when you gather it in. As Goglo put in it in Dead Souls: "Once, long ago, in the years of my youth, in the years of my childhood, which have flashed irretrievably(不能挽回地）by, it was a joy for me to drive for the very first time to a place unknown."
