"Like that poem I knew, about how you sit and read your way through a book then close the book and put it on the shelf, and maybe, life being so short, you’ll die before you ever open that book again and its pages, the single pages, shut in the book in the shelf, will maybe never see light again, which is why I had to leave the shop, because the man who owned it was looking at me oddly, because I was doing the thing I find myself doing in all bookshops because of that maddening poem - taking a book off a shelf and fanning it open so that each page sees some light, then putting it back on, then taking the next one along off and doing the same."

Ali Smith, Girl Meets Boy