Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat in the Bookshop

Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat by Ernest Bramah

"I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time." - Virginia Woolf

 

The Last Samurai in the Bookshop

The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt

"Well, there’s good fiction. There are wonderful books, and yes, it’s good to read them. Maybe if you’ve read a lot of fiction, you reach this stage of satiation, and you start thinking well, what’s the point, but then you talk to people who’ve read barely any, and you realize that things you take for granted if you’ve read a lot of fiction—unreliable narrators, how language frames your perception of people—things that seem obvious to the point of banality, except they’re not to people who aren’t in the habit of reading fiction." - Helen DeWitt