This piece contains seven important warnings against buying books; fortunately, at the time of this writing, our books are free. We’d like to remind you that if you’re reading this before about November 15, our book ”
I HATE Your Prophecy: Dark, satirical, but real standalone fantasy: What Happens When The Dark Lord Is Tired Of Dragons, Knight, White Wizards, and Chosen Ones, and what she does about it
is free on kindle. And A Goblincore Guide To Life is just free.
And on books, here are 7 reasons not to read any:
1. You buy a slim volume of verse. The clerk’s receipt is printed on thermal paper that, once exposed to the mild heat of your pocket, expands into a full-scale accordion map of every library you’ve ever entered. While unfolding it on the sidewalk you trip over a loose cobblestone, which dislodges a nearby fire hydrant, which sprays a passing bicycle courier, who swerves into a street vendor’s cart of antique mirrors. One of the mirrors reflects the sun directly into the open eyes of a local magistrate who was, at that exact moment, deciding whether to pardon a notorious forger. He does not. The forger, upon learning of the missed clemency, dedicates the rest of his life to forging your signature on increasingly elaborate promissory notes. Within three years you are the unwilling proprietor of three failed shipping companies and one moderately successful scheme to corner the market in forged first editions. You have become a Villain, though a somewhat bookish one. As Oscar Wilde observed, “I can resist everything except temptation,” and the temptation to keep buying the books that started this was, in retrospect, the least of your problems. (Also the hydrant is still spraying. Nobody has fixed it. The courier is now a recurring minor antagonist who shows up whenever you try to monologue.)
2. You acquire a thick fantasy novel in a used bookstore. The previous owner has underlined a single sentence on page 217: “Power is the only true currency.” While walking home you pass a construction site where a crane operator is eating a sandwich and not watching the load. The wind turns the page of your open book; the underlined sentence flutters free and lands on the operator’s sandwich. He reads it, decides the crane is his true power, and lowers a steel I-beam directly onto a parked municipal van. The van contains the city’s entire supply of parking-meter keys. Chaos ensues. You spend the next six months arguing with traffic court, during which time you develop a taste for black cloaks, binary moralities, and referring to ordinary librarians as “apprentices.” You are now, for all practical purposes, a Sith Lord. Your lightsaber is a highlighter. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” Socrates said, but he never had to examine the life of someone who accidentally toppled a parking-meter regime with a single underlined sentence. (The crane operator later joins your cause. He is not especially competent, but he is very good at moving heavy things onto other heavy things.)
3. You purchase a travel memoir. The cashier bags it with a complimentary bookmark that is, in fact, a thin strip of vellum from a medieval manuscript. That night you fall asleep with the book on your chest. The vellum, still faintly luminous from centuries of candlelight, absorbs the ambient glow of your bedside lamp and re-emits it as a slow, hypnotic pulse. You dream that you are a 19th-century balloonist. You wake convinced you can navigate by cloud formation. You quit your job, buy a used hot-air balloon on credit, and drift across three counties while reading the memoir aloud to the birds. You become a Dreamer. Wordsworth claimed that “the world is too much with us,” but he failed to anticipate that the world might include a vellum bookmark capable of inducing permanent aeronautical delusion. (Also one of the birds is now following you. It has opinions about your reading material. They are not kind.)
4. You buy a single paperback. Its spine is slightly warped. When you open it, the warp creates a subtle vacuum that pulls the nearest houseplant an inch closer to the table. The plant’s leaves brush a stack of unopened mail, which topples into the cat’s water bowl, which short-circuits the wireless router, which forces you to read the paperback by window light. By page forty you have finished the book and immediately ordered three more. You are now a person who really enjoys reading. Virginia Woolf once wrote that “one cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well,” but she neglected to mention that one also cannot stop ordering paperbacks if the first one has quietly rewired the household electronics. (The cat is fine. The cat is always fine. The cat is also the only one who seems to understand what is happening, and it is not sharing.)
5. You acquire a cookbook. The recipe for “simple tomato soup” requires, according to a printer’s error, “one medium onion and the complete works of Proust.” While searching for the Proust you knock over a jar of peppercorns. The peppercorns roll under the refrigerator, dislodging a forgotten magnet that holds an old takeout menu to the fridge door. The menu falls into the trash, which you empty the next morning into a dumpster behind the restaurant whose menu it was. The chef, recognizing his own menu in the dumpster, becomes convinced of industrial espionage and begins serving only increasingly elaborate dishes to anyone who looks bookish. You are now banned from three restaurants and have developed an involuntary flinch whenever anyone says “soup.” As Mark Twain noted, “The secret of getting ahead is getting started,” though he did not specify that the starting point might be a single misprinted onion. (You eventually just start bringing your own soup. This is treated as further evidence of your villainy.)
6. You buy a philosophy text. The cashier, who is also a part-time philosophy graduate student, stamps the receipt with a slogan: “Question everything.” You place the receipt in your wallet. Weeks later the wallet is stolen. The thief, reading the stamp while counting your cash, experiences a sudden crisis of purpose and returns the wallet along with a handwritten apology and a single, carefully chosen pebble. You keep the pebble. It becomes the first object in a growing collection of returned stolen goods accompanied by existential notes. You are now the unwilling curator of a small museum of remorse. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” Rousseau observed, though the chains in this case are made of returned wallets and carefully chosen pebbles. (One of the notes is just the word “sorry” written in what appears to be blood. You have not asked whose. You are not going to.)
7. You purchase a children’s picture book as a gift. While wrapping it you use too much tape. The excess tape sticks to your sleeve, which sticks to the wrapping paper, which sticks to the cat, who bolts out the open window trailing a glittering banner of gift wrap. The banner snags on a passing drone delivering groceries. The drone, overloaded, drops a single orange onto the roof of a car belonging to the local literary prize committee. The orange rolls into the gutter and is mistaken, by a passerby with strong opinions about symbolism, for a deliberate artistic statement about the decline of narrative. The passerby writes a letter to the editor. The letter is read by a judge who was already wavering on whether to award this year’s prize to a novel about oranges. The novel wins. You are now, by a chain of adhesive and citrus, responsible for the year’s most controversial literary award. “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Tolstoy wrote, but he never had to explain to a literary committee that the unhappiness began with too much tape and a picture book about a rabbit. (The rabbit is on the cover. It looks judgmental. You have started avoiding eye contact with it.)
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And if you want a short free read, try some Dungeon Doggerel.
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