It's difficult for me to take A Wrinkle in Time off my shelf. No, I don't mean emotionally...though in the wake of Madeleine's passing this past fall, there was a bit of that involved too. I mean it's literally hard to take the book off my shelf because my original copy is broken in three pieces.
Wrinkle is one of the few books of my life that I have loved so much I have literally read it to pieces. The binding broke years ago, on who knows which repeated reading. It's in tatters. The pages are brownish-yellow. The cover is completely off. I used to keep a rubber band around the whole thing to hold it together, but that seemed to hurt it worse, so now I just let it be, sandwiched in between Dance in the Desert and A Wind in the Door, near the beginning of my L'Engle collection.
I confess, when I re-read Wrinkle last fall, I read another copy, one I bought at a used book sale. But I just can't get rid of this one. It was the first Madeleine book I ever read, the copy I clutched in my eager eleven year old hands the first time I followed Meg, Charles Wallace and Calvin to Camazotz. Even broken, maybe especially broken, it's one of my book treasures.
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2 comments:
Very cool illustration of how much this book has meant to you. It reminds me of The Velveteen Rabbit; the things that are loved the most tend to be the shabbiest, but for the person to whom it's brought so much joy, it's just as beautiful as when it was brand new.
Ah, that's a lovely comparison. :-) I hadn't thought of that!
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