I have to admit – it was surprisingly easy becoming friends with my book at first. The very first encounter wasn’t difficult at all. I tracked it down almost instantly, a couple of clicks and I’d ordered it from the library, a few days later and it was ready for me to pick up.
When we first met, it seemed quite an easy-going book, easy enough to become fast friends: Not too talkative, merely a handful of pages to flip through, and quite picturesque, with detailed illustration on about every other page. With German we even shared our mother tongue, although its author definitely was from another time – and so were the fonts.
And so the book spent quite some time in my locker, we dind’t talk much, but it didn’t seem to mind it much. This new scenery, compared to its usual spot in the library shelves, must’ve been a welcome change for a while anyhow.
I learned about its author when we had more contact for the second task. I learned more about the author a bit more – although I’ still not sure whether he preferres his first name as Jan, or Hans, or maybe something entirely different from that. And I learned about its theme, it’s structure, it’s purpose for which it was originally out there.
And although my book, or should I say “my friend”, had been so accessible physically, in the “real world”, I had quite a bit of difficulty connecting with it through the virtual world in comparison. I had a hard time finding any digital versions available to me, in the original language anyways, and only after a long search did I encounter some transcriptions and translations in the world wide web. Nor was I able to find hardly information about this book or it’s publishing history online. Maybe that can be traced back to my own inability or even lack of motivation to do a thourough search, or perhaps there really is very little about this particular book out there. However, the friendship, one could say, remained predominantly an analogue one.
I’m still unsure about what I learned from this experience, or what I was supposed to essentially. Even though the tasks have been entertaining at times, a fun little distraction from the ususal assignments, it did have a feel to it that reminded me of the pen pals we were assigned in primary school: That one “friend” you were assigned to and had absolutely nothing in common with, but were obliged to write to every month or so, wether you felt like it or not. (And these particular friendships never lasted in the long term).
So, in conclusion, I appreciate the creativity and general idea of this assignment, in the future I think I’ll stick with becoming friends with books of my own choosing.