When we were given the first instructions for „Friends with and old Book“, I was rather confused. I didn’t see why we had to do such a weird exercise, though I found the name „Friends with an old Book“ quite interesting and creative.
The first task seemed quite standard for school work, researching some background information was something I had done a thousand times in my life, so it didn’t bother me too much, although when we had to „meet“ I started disliking the whole Friends with an old Book thing. Initially my book was located in Einsiedeln, and i just didn’t think it was worth it to go there to meet with a book but then I was assigned a different book that was located in Zürich and that was nice.
I still didn’t like the whole exercise and all the following tasks were somewhat annoying to do. I didn’t quite see the purpose of gathering information and such, about a literally completely random old book, that wasn’t famous, that we didn’t have to read and was in a in a foreign language for some people.
What I did like however was seeing, touching and turning the pages of this huge (50 cm) and really old book, as you don’t normally get the chance of doing so with such antique and delicate things.
The weirdest task was probably the last one, about the conversation between different books. I found it annoying to do, but i liked the core idea of this task, as i found it quite unique. I found it interesting to sort of derive a personality from its content and then letting different personalities from different books interact with each other.
I come to the conclusion that, this whole friends with an old book thing was really weird, sometimes really annoying and sometimes quite interesting and unique. I wouldn’t say that we became good friends though.