At the age of eighteen, reading was terribly borin...
At the age of eighteen, reading was terribly boring to me before an old friend put a Raymond Carver book in my hands. It started like that, then Marguerite Duras, Yukio Mishima, Dostoevsky ...
"But how do you know in advance what I'm going to like?" I asked him once. She explained to me that what I was missing was a real bookstore, a place where books "jump on you". She knew one: Le Divan.
Since then, when I go to the Divan, I never know in advance what I'm going to find. I go to see a bookseller, she asks me a few questions, I answer her honestly, she thinks for a moment, then in two steps three movements puts a small stack of books in my hands. Almost every time it hits the mark! It's a magic trick that only good booksellers know about and I'm revealing it to you today!