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I was viscerally made aware of the importance of books (and reading) to my existence when I read Richard Powers' "Plowing the Dark" - in one of the plot lines an American teacher is kidnapped and held hostage in Beirut - with NOTHING to read. As the teacher struggled to remember books he had read, and tried to recreate them in his mind to maintain his hold on sanity during his captivity - I realized that I would go completely crazy in a situation where I could not read a book. This would be for me a truly unimaginable, and unsurvivable, experience.
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