This year’s installment of the excellent Dave Eggers edited analogy series—Best American Non-Required Reading—has a forward from none other than the late Ray Bradbury. And according to official Bradbury biographer Sam Weller this essay “...is the last thing he wrote.” The piece is called “The Book and the Butterfly” and it details the author’s first experiences with the joy of reading and checking out tons of books from the library. From the piece:
When I was seven years old, I started going to the library and I took out ten books a week. The librarian looked at me and asked, “What are you doing?”
I said, “What do you mean?”
And she said, “You can’t possibly read all of those before they are due back.”
I said, “Yes, I can.”
The full excerpt is available on The Huffington Post. Read it there and get some tissue handy.