There are certain books that one remembers together with the material circumstances of reading: how long it took, the time of year, the color of the cover. Often, it’s the material circumstances themselves that make you remember a book that way - but sometimes it’s the other way around. I’m sure that my memory of that afternoon - the smell of rain and baking chocolate, the depressing apartment with its inflatable sofa, the sliding glass door that overlooked rainy palm trees and a Safeway parking lot - is due to the precious, almost-lost quality of Babel’s 1920 diary.
- Elif Batuman, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
(Source: ex-tabulis)
