Sometimes, books are connected to an author with sinew and bone. Others slide out without only a thin cord to connect them to their source, easily cut and tied off. But I think the best books are those that stubbornly stay connected with the author despite every attempt to control them, make them an entity that can live an independent life of its own, with those who love it in distant places and form sinew and bone connections with them wherever they are.

Sit back in your chair and close your eyes. Can you remember the texture of the scratchy upholstery of the tiny easy chair and ottoman your grandpa made for your big sister when she was a toddler, the chair where you read Go Dog, Go! over and over when you first learned to read, the chair already a bit too small for your little behind, your heels resting on that itchy and faded red wool? That book was your borning-cry to literature, leaving you with the sound of a snap and forever in a hunger for another book. You never imagined it still connected to its author but you’re sure it left a mark when it left his skin.

Can you remember the classroom where Mrs. Winkler, who you were sure loved you, read A Wrinkle in Time and you flew out of your wooden desk the one with one piece of smooth gum stuck underneath and the story flung you into the Universe to find good and evil? That book stayed connected to you by a ligament through skin and into a muscle that twitched now and then. It seemed to have more of a connection back to the one who imagined it, bone to muscle.

Then, there was the white sofa in the hospital lobby where you’d finished your schoolwork and read To Kill a Mockingbird. You saw your own reflection in that book and the author’s too even though you know she was a child shifted into another time-reality. When you heard her history, you knew she was still connected with her book with sinew and guts and bone and and even some flimsy white nerve tissue and she would never be able to let it go completely. Did it cause her pain every time you carried her book, still connected to her, into that hospital lobby where your Atticus father lay dying of cancer three floors up and you weren’t allowed to visit because you were too young to go in with your family according to hospital rules? Could she also feel the tingly impressions that sofa left on the backs of your legs from sitting in one place for so long? Could she feel your hunger when dinner time came and went even though you’d been there since play-practice ended? I’d bet she could because that book was so tightly wound into both her and your own souls. Sinew, guts, bone, and nerve. You can open your eyes now that you remember how that book feels that became a part of your own soul yet stayed connected to its author.

Thank you for listening, jules