My friendship with my book started of in the autumn of 2019. Growing up, I didn’t enjoy reading books very much, and when the Task of becoming friends with an old book was given to me, I was a bit discouraged at first. I thought to myself, how on earth am I supposed to be friends with a book, let alone an Old book?. Honestly, I expected myself to be overwhelmed by this. As the title of the Book was given to me, I was even more discouraged, because the title itself (which is in old-german language) consists of 250 words. I didn’t even know it was possible for a title to be that long!
Worried that I wouldn’t understand a single word in the book, as it was written in old-german, it was to my surprise that during my first contact with my friend, this worry was lifted off my chest. The visit to the Oechslin library, and the one-on-one contact with my book definitely helped me gain confidence and a better understanding of it. Suddenly my book was communicating to me, and I was listening. Although most of the text was unreadable due to the old-style font, and mainly incomprehensible because of the old-german language, my book was speaking to me through its many illustrations and drawings, delivering the necessary information for me to somewhat understand what my new friend is trying to tell me. This first contact was a crucial step to further friendship, as online sources couldn’t help me much, like how a friendship works better when you get to know a person in real life as opposed to talking with them online.
Over the course of the semester, our friendship has grown, though mainly through my memory of the first contact with my book because not much information could be gained through the internet. Tasks like analysing the images and illustrations helped our friendship move forward, while other tasks like analysing the text part of my book was rather an unprofitable experience in this case, mainly because of the language barrier between my friend and I.
My friendship with my book, I would describe it as a long-distance friendship. Keeping the friendship alive through my memory of our first encounter, and trying to make the most of that. My book was the quiet friend, the kind you’d have to figure out what is on their mind by reading their behaviour.
However, this friendship came to an end during the last task, when even an advanced program couldn’t read out what my book was trying to communicate with us. Therefore I was assigned a new book “The Book of the Courtier” by Baldassare Castiglione.