Is a 25-year-old book old?
Not really. Think of the classics published hundreds of years ago that we still read and re-read. And the most-read book in the world today is overwhelmingly the Bible--the writing spanned roughly 1,500 years.
But because my books are just a quark in the book world, a 25-year-old one is old. The last copy had long disappeared from bookstores.
It was the year 2001. I had fled from the workplace and decided to focus on my first love: writing. Rummaging through my baul (storage trunk), I saw tons of old manuscripts, re-wrote and polished some, then sent a thick stack to OMF Literature.
Some of my musings graduated from passion to publication. It would be a two-book series (non-fiction; inspirational genre), with the title “Gifts of Grace.”
That blessed birth has spawned and, hopefully. will continue to spawn more books (and blogs) on the grace in and around me.
Twenty-five years later, today . . .
This was posted to social media by a dear friend (whom I still have to meet in person). She is re-reading the first edition of Gifts of Grace 2 (hard cover). This shook me to the core.
She said in part that no matter how often she re-reads the book, “it's like listening to your favorite old songs over and over again.”
The comments on the above photo almost undid me.
From a male reader, “It’s not just the story I revisit, but the person I used to be when I first read it and that’s where the melancholy comes from.”
From an editor, “. . . fondly remembering reading the manuscript and thinking, ‘Wow, I didn’t know Pinoy Christians could write so beautifully without being preachy.”
And from a new reader . . . she finished the book in one sitting, and wrote that she was in hysterics reading the last chapter.
Gifts of Grace had a book 3, a part of the re-designed and updated softbound editions.
Truth be told, grace covers the full spectrum: from A to Z, from old to new.
No comments:
Post a Comment