PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

The TerryReport is republishing this essay by photographer Jan Jacobs. A link to his website is included following the essay. More book topics at the left buttons under BOOKS & LIT.

Have you every held a book in your hands so perfectly written and somehow so appropriate to your present circumstance that after reading a certain passage you find yourself over come by a desire to hug that book while reminiscing about what you have just read as though it were a fond yet distance memory of a special time in your life? I have this all the time; and not just with the Bible either. I am talking about Charles Dickens and, most recently, Nicholas Nickleby. I have blogged about Dickens before but I just can’t say enough good things about him, or more accurately, his books. It was as though Dickens was writing with just me in mind every time he sat down and put pen to paper. After finishing David Copperfield an insatiable need to read more Dickens burned within me. I knew I had more Dickens books in the house so I ran for the book shelf, throwing the contents of my “too readâ€� pile aside, desperately searching for more. I was in a hail of paperbacks, throwing titles aside like Tess of the Urbervilles, Mansfield Park, six or twelve of the twenty-one Dune books, and Anna Karenina (no, your eyes were not deceiving you I slipped a subtle Dune reference in there; and yes, sci-fi is a guilty reading-pleasure of mine), tossing these titles aside as though they were something other than the classics they are (most of the latter Dune incarnations excluded), sifting through books till I reached the bottom of the pile where I knew more Dickens were hiding.

When I finished my mad search, I had three books in my hand–A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, and Nicholas Nickleby
â “and a dilemma before me” how to choose? Without resorting to casting lots, I had to choose just by looking. You can’t judge a book by its cover, that is for sure; which is a good thing too, because a Wordsworth Classic (especially a Dickens) is a jewel wrapped in a rag, their covers being so boring as to make you want to skip the book for this very reason. Instead I chose another visual queue to assist me in my decision-making: weight. I choose the heaviest book because more weight means more volume; more volume means more pages; and more pages means more words; and more words means longer read time, which is perfect because, after finishing David Copperfield (a fairly hefty book at that), I found it was far too short, my conversation with David ending long before I was ready. For this reason I chose Nicholas Nickleby, the largest Dickens book I could find. It is a particular pet peeve of mine (in a love-hate sort of way) that, once a book is completed, you have to start a new one; because, after spending hours getting to know and love the people who populate the pages of a book you just finished, you have to leave them behind and start acquainting yourself with someone new all over again.

This time, so as to forestall the ending of this book and so that I could have the greatest amount of time possible conversing with the author through his characters before having to start a new book, I choose the biggest book possible.

Which, incidentally, didn’t work that well because it turned out to be far too short as well.

JAN JACOB, Edmunton photographer and writer

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