I DIDN’T WEAR MY BIG OVERCOAT to hold the sign this morning for the first time in months. It was a little warmer so I wore a fleece, not a Patagonia, but that kind. I’m aware of what I wear with the sign. I don’t want to look too put together or I’ll come off maybe as a politician who’ll be asking for something later. But I don’t want to look too casual about the message of the sign either. I never wear my BERNIE beanie. I never wear my black San Francisco Giants hat. I never go more than a day or two without shaving. What it says on the sign is what matters and I want to look that way.

‘Choosing a book is so gratifying, it’s worth dragging out the process, starting even before finishing the current one. As the final chapters approach, you can pile up the possibilities like a stack of travel brochures. You can lay out three books and let them linger overnight before making a final decision in the morning. You can Google the reviews; ask other people if they’ve read it, collect information. The choice may ultimately depend on the mood and the moment. ‘You have to read a book at the right time for you,’ Lessing also said, ‘and I am sure this cannot be insisted on too often, for it is the key to the enjoyment of literature.’.   
                                           ― Pamela Paul, Times book editor 

It’s a rainy day. I’m at the local NYC branch library which is two blocks from my apartment. It’s a small library. You’re more apt to order a book from the system’s online site and pick it up here than find it on the shelf. I’m an unusual regular. Neighborhood residents in market-rate apartments don’t come in to stay; they pick up a book they ordered and leave. The people who stay are maybe homeless, maybe addicts, maybe recent immigrants, maybe people needing help with their taxes or help with some government form. Upstairs there are pre-pre-school children’s programs. Nannies with darker skin than the little kids in the strollers are lined up many mornings 10-20 deep waiting for the doors to open.

‘I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading has opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.’

-Malcolm X

‘My brother was one of the bigger influences in my life, in as much as he told me I didn't have to read the choice of books that I was recommended at school, and that I could go out to the library and go and choose my own, and sort of introduced me to authors that I wouldn't have read probably. You know, the usual things like the Jack Kerouacs, the Ginsbergs, the e.e. cummings and stuff.’
                                                         ― David Bowie

‘The greatest gift is the passion for reading.
It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites,
it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind.
It is a moral illumination.’
                               ― Elizabeth Hardwick        

‘In Tereza’s eyes, books were the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the world of crudity surrounding her: the novels. She had read any number of them, from Fielding to Thomas Mann. They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk down the street with a book under her arm. It had the same significance for her as an elegant cane from the dandy a century ago. It differentiated her from others.’
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being