Generally I like being friends with books, however i get to choose by myself which ones I would count as friends and which ones I don’t. That is why I was quite sceptical when someone else gave me a book to be friends with. When i saw that my book was written in french and really old I thought it will be difficult to make friends with it.
Alone the title and subtitle: “Nouveau traité de toute l’architecture. : Utile aux entrepreneurs, aux ouvriers, & à ceux qui font bâtir. Où l’on trouvera aisément & sans fraction, la mesure de chaque ordre de colonne, & ce qu’il faut observer dans les edifices publics, ou particuliers”, is so long and i did not understand what it was about. As we had to identify all the details about the book I did not at all see the sense in this task and it simply did not really interest me. This made it hard to find my new friend pleasant.
The next task was all about making contact and that is when I unexpectedly started to actually enjoy this new friendship. At first I thought, how am I going to look at a book for twenty minutes straight if I can’t even properly understand what is written. However as soon as I held the book in my hands for the first time I was kind of amazed. I had never had a book that was over 300 years old and it felt kind of magical. I was so interested in looking at it and finding out the things we were supposed to get to know about the book for this task that the twenty minutes went past in no time.
Sadly after the second task the friendship did not grow much further. I did find the next two tasks a little useless because even though I now knew how the book is built up and how it is written there was still the language barrier. The OCR and the translation were not the best so that did not help that much either. Personally I guess to really become friends with a book I need to be able to read the whole thing and enjoy the story or find the topics interesting that the book adresses. That is why in conclusion i would say I’m not good friends with my old book but we are friendly colleagues.