For me, books are actually mostly just literature that makes me think, educates me or entertains me. When I read a book, it usually catches me right at the beginning, and I read the whole book in no time, or I put it aside quickly. Either way, I have never spent so much time with a book without actually reading it.
Friends with an old book? At first I thought what a strange exercise it was. Since I like to read books very much, I thought it was a real pity that I shouldn’t find out more about the content of the book. Since my book is written in Italian, I also wondered what sense it makes to work with a book that I couldn’t even understand. However, with time I began to understand that this could be exactly what it was all about. I got to know a completely different approach to books.
The first task seemed very superficial. It was done very quickly and my interest in the whole task did not really increase. But already when I met my book in Einsiedeln, my view on the exercise changed. I found it very exciting to hold this very old and rare book in my hands (at that time I didn’t know that I was given a different, but also very old book (#27) during my visit).
In the library some exciting things were explained to me which I had not known before. It was also very nice to talk to the librarian who had a great passion for such old books.
Another highlight of the exercise for me was this last task. I did not expect this turn and I was very surprised to see how the text files from our books had actually brought together related books. I started to inform myself about my book, found some texts in which my book from 1553 served as source and so I managed to understand my book, although I probably would never have been able to read the original book. It became clear to me what kind of book it was and why it was written. This fascinated me very much. Although it was a bit of a crazy task for me to create a chat between books where I was supposed to speak as a book, this group work was a lot of fun.
Something that really bothers me, however, is that I can’t really be sure whether I understood my book or not. I had to rely almost entirely on online sources and thus could not get my own impression of the original.