I love massive books: books so big, like bricks, you could drown yourself in a pool with them if you're not careful.
As movers and the moved both know, books are heavy freight, the weight of refrigerators and sofas broken up into cardboard boxes. They make us think twice about changing addresses.
A book has to be easy to open and you don't have to be a bodybuilder to lift it. I like books I can read in bed. Those big tombstones would kill me.
The book may be garbage, but if it weighs in at a kilo or more, I stand before its author in awe.
This is one of those big, fat paperbacks, intended to while away a monsoon or two, which, if thrown with a good overarm action, will bring a water buffalo to its knees.
There, in the tin factory, in the first moment of the atomic age, a human being was crushed by books.
I subscribe to the theory that reading a book is similar to walking a trail, and I'm most comfortable walking when I can see where I'm going and where I've been. When I'm reading a printed book, the weight of the pages I've turned gives me a sense of how far I've come.
For the price of a couple of Happy Meals, you can buy a digital textbook and stop your child from having to carry around a six-pound book.
We write in a culture that favors the heft of the novel. Better still if the novel in question is large enough to be wielded interchangeably as a doorstop and a weapon.
