Reading Quirks. Andrés de la Casa Huertas

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      “Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.”

      –Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote

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      Reading Quirks

      The Wild Detectives & Laura Pacheco

      Reading Quirks was originally published on The Wild

      Detectives social media outlets. A comic strip was posted every

      Wednesday for over 72 consecutive weeks from September 2016,

      to January 2018.

      For this edition, 14 of the original stories were discarded, and

      replaced by 14 new and unpublished comic strips (pages 44-45,

      47, 59, 61, 64-65, 67, 75-78 y 80-81).

      All the original stories can be seen on:

       instagram.com/readingquirks

      The Wild Detectives

      314 W Eighth St.

      Dallas, TX 75208 (U.S.A.)

      [email protected]

      www.thewilddetectives.com

      © The Wild Detectives, 2019

      © Of this edition: The Wild Detectives

       & Pepitas de calabaza ed.

      Art Direction & Graphic Design: Andrés de la Casa-Huertas

      Illustrations: Laura Pacheco

      ISBN: 978-19-41920-89-3First edition, October, 2019

      Pepitas de calabaza ed.

      Apartado de correos nº 40

      26080 Logroño (La Rioja, España)

      [email protected]

      www.pepitas.net

      

      

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      READING QUIRKS

      A co-edition between The Wild Detectives (Dallas, TX) and Pepitas de Calabaza (Logroño, Spain)

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      8

      Wild Readers

      by Ben Fountain

      Reading Quirks is a work of nonfiction. You have in your hands an anthropological study of a strange and far-ran-ging human tribe, a tribe that gets from the reading of books the kind of happiness that other people derive from wrestling alligators. Everything in these pages is true; more than that, it is all scientifically true. We read in the tub, on the toilet, in the hospital emergency room, while showering or brushing our teeth, standing in line at the post office, waiting for the subway, the plane, the bus (“Oh, it’s raining?”), while walking the dog, riding a bike, swaying in a shady hammock. We agree with Borges, that heaven must be something like a library. We secretly dog-ear pages, and feel bad about ourselves afterwards. When we spot someone with a book, we’ll sprain our necks trying to get a glimpse of the cover. Our way of prepping for the apocalypse is to stockpile books, and surely the hardest part of packing for a trip is deciding which books to take, stalked as we are by the ever-present existential dread that someday, somewhere, we’ll find ourselves without anything to read. It’s not that we’re anti-social; far from it. It’s just that we often prefer to be silently social with the people on the page, who are, let’s face it, usually more interesting and entertaining than the flesh-and-blood versions.

      Reading Quirks is particularly fine in exploring the olfac-tory dimension of our tribal culture. The crisp menthola-ted tang of a brand-new book makes it impossible to start reading without a good get-to-know-you sniff first. The potency of old books is even stronger, with their warm, yeasty smells of an after-hours bakery. This is the very odor of remembrance of things past, not unlike opening a tin of soda crackers manufactured during the reign of Edward VII. Reading Quirks is equally brave in tackling the great taboo, the dark side, if you will, of bibliomania. Borrowing books, lending books, one friend to another;

      Ben Fountain is the author of collection of short stories Brief Encounters with Che Guevara(Ecco Press, 2006) and Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco Press, 2012) –adapted in 2016 into a major motion picture, directed by Ang Lee. Last year he also published his essay on Trump’s 2016 campaign Beautiful Country Burn Again (Ecco Press, 2018). He has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fic-tion, and a Whiting Writers’ Award, among other honors and awards.

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      9

      nothing but pain and heartbreak ever came of it, not to mention the occasional assault. Better to do like that smart young woman on page 15 who buys all the copies of a favorite book to give to her friends, thereby saving herself the bother of murdering them when they don’t return her copy.

      Implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, Reading Quirks poses the question: Is there a place for

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