reading notes

by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
ISBN: 0156528207

I’ve been putting off writing this review for the longest time because, well — hasn’t everyone read this book by now? At least once? What else is there to say about it?

That it’s charming (really charming, without being at all smarmy)? That it will disarm cynical readers? Make you cry if you let it? That it is a small book, you could read it all in one sitting, but it will stay with you long after you put it down? I’m pretty sure all these things have been said about The Little Prince many, many times.

That doesn’t make them any less true.

I had a stack of books to read on vacation (most, I will confess, are still unread) and a few books set aside to read to get to vacation. This was one of those. I needed a shot of whimsy and true emotion and questioning the absurdity of most grown ups, and this book delivered it. It’s the kind of thing I shouldn’t read once, but probably once every few months.

If you haven’t read it in awhile, do yourself a favor. You probably need to see the not-really-very-good sketches (except for the boa constrictor) and be reminded.

In the course of this life, I have had a great many encounters with a great many people who have been concerned with matters of consequence. I have lived a great deal among grown-ups. I have seen them intimately, close at hand. And that hasn’t much improved my opinion of them.

by Richard Bach

I bought this book over twenty-five years ago in a second-hand shop. (Holy crap!) I spent the then, to me, significant amount of $5 on the hardcover mostly because I was captivated by the seagull photographs. Some were printed on translucent paper, and the play of light and the birds in flight was something I had to have.

I had no idea who Richard Bach was at that time. I didn’t run out and read all his stuff afterwards, either, though I do still have a copy of Illusions. Turns out, I remembered more about the photos than I did the story. It is about flight (literally and metaphorically), freeing yourself from constraints, and passing the lesson along.

I still like the seagull photos, but they seem a wee bit less magical to me now than they did then. Maybe this is because I’m more cynical as a full-grown person, or maybe this is because I’ve spent a lot of time on photography in the intervening years. Still, I’m glad I have the book, and that I reread it as part of my keep-sane-until-vacation reading list. [Yes, I'm really behind in posting reviews, that this is going up only now.]