![]() There’s a storm, and they can’t get off the island, and I just thought, ‘THIS IS AWESOME.’ ” “During the last snowstorm, I was reading ‘Ten Little Indians’ by Agatha Christie. “I think there’s something really nice about books where people are isolated and have no option to leave,” says Ozma, the author. What we are looking for is a flickering light, a Kindle with fresh downloads, a stack of paperbacks with the spines broken in - and exactly the right genre to sink our brains into. “That’s probably not what these people are looking for.” “It’s a great effect,” he says hopefully. “You know, they have battery-operated flameless candles,” says Pete Piringer, the D.C. When there is nothing else we should be doing - no vacuums can be run, no treadmills can be run upon - it is easier to retreat, guiltlessly, into reading “ The Chronicles of Narnia” for the 27th time, spooning ice cream from the carton (it will melt, anyway) and watching words flicker on the page. When the real world goes fuzzy, the world on the page grows sharper. The candlelight can pull us all together.”Įverything is cozier in candlelight. People used to have to gather together, around the light. “We say that televisions pull us apart, because we each have sets in our own room,” Beavan says. Then that’s a whole different situation.”ĭuring their powerless year, Beavan and his wife spent many nights sitting at their kitchen table with candles and books or playing cards. “And,” he advises, “the candle should be between you and the book, not off to the side unless, of course, you have a candelabra. “First, the book absolutely has to be tipped up,” says Colin Beavan, a documentarian who lived without electricity for a year as part of his “ No Impact Man” project. (The Victorian Trading Co., for example, understands the appeal: Its Web site sells a Sip & Read by Candlelight Bathtub Caddy, which includes a built-in bookrack, a candlestick and a holder for your wineglass.)Ĭandlelight reading is a fantasy that persists even though those who have tried it will attest that the act is not nearly as romantic as it sounds. One imagines that it is akin to the pleasure of baking on hot bleachers for a sports team, a ludicrous activity that sounds perfectly dreadful, though some people appear to enjoy it. The exquisite pleasure of reading in storms, reading under duress, reading via melting wax is not something that can be explained to someone who does not automatically understand the appeal of such an activity. Stuck for an extended period of time.” She cites being stranded for 24 hours on a train in the high plains of Bolivia. “My idea of heaven,” says Elissa Miller, the associate director of collections for the District’s public library system, “is to just be stuck somewhere. A dream that involves hot chocolate and fuzzy slippers, and showcasing one’s literary dedication by self-punishing one’s eyesight. This weekend, as most of the Eastern Seaboard prepares for a watery wallop, as everyone else brawls over nonperishables in Giant, bookworms are preparing to live out a deep and soulful dream. “It’s hunkering down, letting those sounds wash over you, and there’s a blanket,” ideally a patchwork quilt. “I think that the biggest thing that the Red Cross left off their emergency-preparedness list is as many library books as you can check out.” Ozma is an author whose debut memoir, “ The Reading Promise,” recounts reading with her father.
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