My friend Marv eats books. He does not eat them for taste. He eats them to gain knowledge. He believes that by eating books he can better remember and store knowledge of those books he has eaten, as if by osmosis.
He started to eat books in college, when we had an exam do on Shakespeare’s Henry the V. He took a pair of scissors, cut up the text book into mulch, stirred it with some milk and ate the copy.
From then on, he was eating books regularly. He ate our county’s phone book, Webster’s Dictionary and the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, which took a week and two blenders. After that he would eat random books. For a while he was into the Russians. He ate a second addition of Gogol’s The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich, all of Chekov and some late 20th century writers like Vladimir Sorokin.
Then he went on to eat American fiction, biographies and so on.
Once I asked him if the subject of the book influences its taste. He said it didn’t, but more the book itself, for example a paperback has more sweet tones to it while hardback usually tastes like octopus or sandals. He also mentioned that he didn’t care for new books, because they use too much glue.
He ate his way through man’s greatest literary achievements, and the occasional “light” pulp novel or reader’s digest.
I do not want to get into digestive issues, but once he described his dejections as
being similar to Paper Mache.
One day he got a call from a newspaper that did a story on him and quickly enough he became a celebrity appearing everywhere: He went on Jay Leno and ate his cue cards; he came to a Michael Chabon signing where he got Michael to sign a book which he later devoured. He even came along to a high profile trial where he ate an international law book, to emphasis the case of the prosecution that the law is being devoured by our corrupt society.
One day he got a call from the Guinness Book of World Records, telling that he won the prize for bring the man who ate the most books. It comes as no surprise that when receiving the award, he ate the book, the certificate and his valet card, which made it hard to find his car at the lot.
After his popularity sore, universities and libraries banned him from going in. a few copyright lawyers tried to sue him as they contested that by digesting a book, it is considered editing, and that is not allowed.
With the advent of electronic book readers, Marv could eat five thousand books in one sitting. But after a while he had to stop eating them, as his doctor told him he was allergic to glass. It caused him internal bleeding.
Sometime later, Marv met a lovely woman and fell in love. He knew everything about love, but it was all cerebral. He couldn’t feel anything in his stomach. No butterflies, no palpating of the heart. Zilch.
So Marv ate her so he could really sense what love felt like. It was a few frightening weeks in our town, when Marv started eating people he had different emotions to. He ate his personal banker, which he hated. He ate his pastor, for he made him feel optimistic and he even ate his cousin who came from out of town unexpectedly and surprised him.
My friend Marv is now sitting in jail where I’ve been told he ate his hand, for he felt loneliness.
