The best kind of books....

" The best kind of books, however, have a delightful mystery about them. They inexplicably create powerful feelings, images, moods, worlds, and parallel narratives the farther away in time you are from the reading. They grow in time. They keep re-creating themselves in your consciousness, they keep growing, keep becoming other books, till they become part of your experience, like something lived, or dreamed, or loved, or suffered".

Ben Okri - A Way of Being Free

some books that come to mind that this extract
triggered the memory of are:

Edward Abbey - Desert Solitaire
Madeleine L'Engel - Walking on Water
Ben Okri - The Famished Road
Paulo Coehlo - probably an amalgamation of several
Bruce Chatwin - Songlines
Annie Dillard - from different books I've read
Antoine de Saint-Exupery - Wind, Sand and Stars / Le Petit Prince
John O'Donohue - Divine Beauty, and some of the
fragments I've read of Anam Cara
Haruki Murakami - again several contributing novels

I'm sure there are many more, and this list will probably be added to
as I remember one that I can't possibly leave off...but have.

These are not even books I necessarily remember in their entirety but something about them took root and remained an swell in my sub-conscious that crests into consciousness every now and then. Images that conjure a sense, or a feeling for me that has grown beyond my experience of simply reading the text. Books that have been for me what Ben Okri describes, in much better words.