I love reading. Books, advertisements, cereal boxes—you name, I read it. During one of my moves to a new apartment, my love of reading was very obvious to the men from church and school who were helping with the heavy lifting. With my usual thorough organization, I had the boxes labeled with a number and a color. The men quickly learned that the small green-labeled boxes were heavy. After a few more loads up to our new third-floor apartment, they discerned that these heavy boxes were books and that there were still many more of them in the truck. Setting down a couple of boxes, one of the men jokingly asked, “Did you know that they make electronic books?”
Of course, I knew that, but e-readers do not have that wonderful book smell or feel. Now, living overseas with my books packed away in, yes, green-labeled boxes, I have resigned myself to trying to read e-books. I think the designers perhaps don’t share my love of reading everything. Every time I open a book, the reader skips directly to the first page of the first chapter. This completely ignores wonderful nuggets in the copyright page and the dedication page and the forward. I know I’m not the only one who reads the dedication page: there’s a book out there entirely about book dedications (Once Again, for Zelda). Reading the dedications is like getting a small piece of hard candy that I enjoy slowly, especially as dedications can link to others. There’s the pleasant surprise when you see that a beloved author dedicated his novel to another of your beloved authors. I love that “huh!” moment when the dedication hints at a whole story behind the book I’m about to read. If I ever manage to finish and publish a novel and dedicate it to someone important in my writing life, then I would hope that my readers would honor that someone and read the dedication. And I can’t be the only who reads the copyright page for hidden treasure, otherwise authors like Lemony Snicket wouldn’t put gems in there. And those gems are worth countless dull copyright pages for the handful of laughs they hold. I have this same view on movie credits, a treasure trove of interesting information and names. Having worked in various crews for stage performances, I know the amount of unseen work that goes into making a play come alive. So, I watch movie credits, noting who the gaffer and the best-boy grip are and who provided craft services (and wondering what exactly a “best-boy grip” is). Long after the theatre is empty, I still sit reading the credits, laughing at awesome names, and pointing out interesting tidbits to my patient friends. In America, this was merely eccentric behavior. Now, overseas, I think I’m confusing local people when I go to the theatre. They all leave as soon as the last line is finished. But then some of them notice those foreigners sitting there (because my friends learned that I watch the whole movie, including ending credits); some of them will sit back down, thinking that the foreigners must know something about the foreign film that they don’t know. Perhaps they wonder why Americans read the credits. Recently, one of my friends saw a new release and messaged me that I should go see it. “You’ll enjoy the credits,” he assured me. He was right: they were awesome.
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