Nice to see you. What books did you bring?
Wide Eyed Funks visit one another every now and again, even though leaving the comforts and libraries of home is difficult for us. We are happy to see each other even if the joy of the family visit is tempered by the knowledge that a certain amount of reading time is going to be sacrificed for actual human interaction. It is, at best, bittersweet. We have developed a solution to the problem. And what I can’t decide is this: is our solution – mutually enacted, endlessly repeated – conscious or unconscious? When a visit to or from a Funk household is impending, the book stack begins. What might the visitor like to read, what might be passed on to the host from the far-flung family collections? Once the visit begins, the discussions about “what have you been reading” are far more interesting than accomplishments, work activities, household life events, yah yah yah. That stuff comes and goes. The books, they linger. And, the best part, since everyone has new books to read, no one is left …
