The City of Dreaming Books

Well, this is supposed to be a busy time in design, but thankfully my design is kinda coming nicely along, allowing me to steal some time to read storybooks.... One that I've just finished reading is "The City of Dreaming Books" by Walter Moers, and I love it if simply because the whole book is concerned with books and reading..hahaha... Imagine a place where people sell drugs to intensify a reading experience.. ("Five drops and you will hallucinate whole novels!"), where there are creatures who feed on reading...(books have different nutritional values, and tastes differ from classics to cheap novels... but above all: you can get fat from reading too much!!! HORRORS! ), where Bookhunters kill and destroy each other in the hunt for rare books, where there are Animatomes (books that are alive, courtesy of Bookemists, which are kinda like Alchemists in our world), and Toxicotomes (poisonous books)...a world where the capital city is called Bookholm and the wealthy folk orders special perfume to impregnate their collection, so they'll always know which books are theirs.. The measure of a brilliant story for me: if it succeeds in conveying another world so well I feel like I experience that world, and when I'm not reading the book, not experiencing it anymore, I wish with my whole heart that the fictional world could really exist....

Anyways, it's now one of my favorite all-time fiction hehehe.... Below are quotes taken from the story:

"This book tells of a place where reading is still a genuine adventure, and by adventure I mean the old-fashioned definition of the word that appears in the Zamonian Dictionary: "A daring enterprise undertaken in a spirit of curiosity or temerity, it is potentially life-threatening, harbours unforeseeable dangers and sometimes proves fatal." Yes, I speak of a place where reading can drive people insane....."

"Reading is an intelligent way of not having to think. Writing..a desperate attempt to extract some dignity from solitude."

"Curiosity is the most powerful incentive in the world. Why? Because it's capable of overcoming the two most powerful dis-incentives in the world: common sense and fear. Curiosity accounts for why children hold their hands over candle flames, why soldiers go to war or scientists venture into the Cogitating Quicksand of Nairland. Curiosity is the reason why all the heroes of Zamonian horror stories 'go inside' sooner or later."