She wanted us to write a description of our bed. “Quite a simple thing: your bed,” she said, speaking slowly and clearly.
About a hundred people raised their hands. Could the bed be any bed we had ever slept in? What about a bed from history? What counted as a bed? Did it have to have legs? Looking mildly surprised, the writer said that she supposed we could write about anything that we considered a bed, though she imagined us writing about the bed in which we ourselves usually woke in the morning.
“How long should it be?” someone asked.
Fatigue flickered over the writer’s face. “It should be as long as it takes you to simply describe your bed.”
I absolutely loved this book.
Not enough to lure you in, I know. The details? The plot? Well, Selin could probably tell you better. She’s a college student who wants to be a writer. She talks about her classes and her teachers and her friends and books and sex. But mostly books. She contemplates. She asks questions. She ponders. She thinks. The New York Times calls her perceptive. I call her, how I wanted to be at her age but lacked the courage to do so. A life of books is not a bad life. A life of life is pretty good too.
( NOTE: After reading Either / Or, I read the NYT review and discovered this book follows the same character that we met in The Idiot. I didn’t meet Selin in The Idiot because I never read that book. I only found Either / Or, in the library, on a whim. I knew nothing about it other than recognizing the author’s name. I went in blind and sometimes that’s the best way. Needless to say, The Idiot is now on my TBR list.)
a million pebbles 
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