I can’t really name my favorite book passage of all times, mostly because they change so often. That, and because I have a pretty bad memory. (As revealed again today, when a dear, old Italian friend of mine declared that during our shared stay in Nice, France, where we attended summer school to learn French, I walked the Boulevards ogling every boy as a potential subject for kissing; but ended up only kissing the son of the concierge, the prettiest boy of them all. Age 16 – it faintly rings a bell….. but oh, so faintly.) I digress.

The books I loved were all connected to the different stages of my life: adventure stories in my confined childhood in an isolated village, and quite often in hospitals for longish stretches. I devoured Karl May, an author who wrote thick heavy volumes of tales of the Wild West (he never set foot onto American soil.) Treasure Island, The Adventure’s of Nils Holgersson, Jim Button and Luke the Enginedriver gave way to The Count of Monte Christo, The Three Musketeers – you get the idea. By age 11 or so it then was the likes of Gone with the Wind, and other romantic novels that had enough historical background that a library would carry it. By 14 I devoted probably the better part of 2 years to the Russians, including Bulgakov’s the Master and Margerita which was published in book form only in 1967.  The next five years saw feminist literature from Doris Lessing, Simone de Beauvoir, Helene Sixous, and Christa Wolf and the proscribed political readings coming out of the 1968 student revolution, from Arendt to Marx to Mao.

The decades after were so filled with required reading for the things I studied, that all other reading had to be entertainment, from mysteries to biographies to science fiction. All this is just to say that the libraries photographed in the link below are places I would feel quite happy in. They offer beautiful passages to read favorite passages!

http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/die-schoensten-bibliotheken-der-welt-fotostrecke-141506-11.html

The journalist photographed all of them with an I Phone……