Last year I spent a summer with a friend in a small coastal town in the United States of America. The house we were staying in had a lovely little library of its own, while outside, everywhere we went we found little free library boxes, and every Monday morning the local library in town had a book sale with a very nice selection of books for very sweet prices. The town even had a sprawling, excellently stocked, second-hand bookstore. Go small-town America!

Having spent most of my life in Amsterdam and New York City, from which almost all second-hand bookstores have disappeared, where the free book boxes are usually empty and libraries have become places that are, for various reasons, loud and/or stinky, this was book heaven. It felt almost as good to me as my grandmother’s second-hand bookstore in Noord-Holland had, where, as a child, I spent lots of quiet time reading in corners on the cool and smooth granite floor, with my grandmother’s dog Borretje curled up next to me. I loved books.

After my father died, I stopped reading. And even when I eventually started again, reading never felt like the home it used to. Not even when I found my Big Love book, the book of my heart, Jacob Israel de Haan’s Pijpelijntjes, did reading feel like home the way it once did.