My reverence for books does not keep me from underlining passages, scribbling margin notes or, gulp, dog-earing the page corners. Every time I think I need to clear out some of my overburdened bookshelves, I see those blunted page corners and realize there is yet another treasure trove I have stored but not mined.

So… as part of this BackStory journey, I’ve given myself a goal that is doable and delightfully distracting: Grab a book at random, open it to whatever page is scored, and share the find. Not sure what it will add up to, if anything. Maybe just a way for me to archive the gems, unbend the corners and, bigger gulp, pass on the books.

My random start, from the novel I finished yesterday early in the flight between St. Louis and Salt Lake City. (It’s ok; I had two more books in my bag.) This from page 35 of “How It All Began,” by Booker Prize winner Penelope Lively. It completes a passage about aging Charlotte’s lifetime relationship with reading:

“… She read to discover how not to be Charlotte, how to escape the prison of her own mind, how to expand, and experience.

Thus has reading wound in with living, each a complement to the other. Charlotte knows herself to ride upon a great sea of words, of language, of stories and situations and information, of knowledge, some of which she can summon up, much of which is half lost, but is in there somewhere, and has had an effect on who she is and how she thinks. She is as much a product of what she has read as of the way in which she has lived; she is like millions of others built by books, for whom books are an essential foodstuff, who could starve without.”