From a book I’m reading that I may have read once before, I caught an aha moment last night. It’s a passage from Jewelweed by David Rhodes, and it involves a conversation between a man in prison and the minister who comes to visit him.

“Is there anything you’d like me to bring next time?” she asks.

Yes, says the man in prison, whose name is Blake. “Three things … books, books and books.”

When the minister asks what kind of books, Blake says he will read most anything, but what he really wants are … “thick books with fine print, difficult sentences, long words, and enormous ideas, books written in a feverish hand by writers who hate the world yet can’t keep from loving it, whose feelings so demand to be understood that if they didn’t write them down they would go blind.”

Sounds good to me.