Loan out your favorite to someone you cherish deeply. A friend of mine lent me "Into The Wild" by Jon Krakauer today and I actually loaned "Erasure" by Percival Everett to my crush last week
thought daughters… pay attention. I love to give gifts to my lovers, but I have lost some of my most treasured, most underlined books to flings. Matt: you owe me Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson, Birds of America by Lorrie Moore and The Idiot (Elif Batuman not Dostoevsky). Shane: you owe me The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. Now, I only give my copies to friends or those I am (seriously) dating. Plus, a lovely friend gifted me a stamp so I WILL KNOW and I will FIND YOU!
my work friend and I have similar taste so I brought the book I was reading to work the other day and read during my break in the hopes she would ask about it which led her to ask “omg is that [the book]??” and I was like “omg yeah it’s [the book]!!” I guess she’d already read it but now I can lend her another book by the same writer and we can talk about BOTH books. being performative is awesome!!
I love to lend my friends books and reread the bits they highlighted and underlined again when they return them to me. It’s like having a conversation with them and you learn so much about how they feel and see the world. I do this with my best friend and it makes me feel so close to her.
