"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library" Jorge Luis Borges

As Frederick Douglass said: “Once you learn to read, you will be forever free”.
I totally share his vision of books. Reading novels allows us to escape of our everyday life or to understand behaviors (ours or of the others). A good book is according to me a book you don’t want to close until you have finished it, a book that shows you a particular life, or what you can do to smooth over your life, to put into perspective your little problems, or to dream about other places, to imagine other lives. I almost only read novels because of that, even if I’m also found of sociologic or historic essays. But to relax, there is nothing better than a good novel!
At present, I’m reading Something to tell you, by the English author Hanif Kureishi. It is the story of a psychoanalyst in London, his patients, his family, his affairs. His calm life will be disturbed by the reappearance of witnesses of a murder he committed years and years ago. I like this book because the author manages to analyze the feelings of the characters in order to make them real, and to show how our behaviors are related to the others and how the human beings are interdependent.
One of my favorite authors is John Irving, and especially two books: The cider house rules and The world according to Garp. The first is the story of a boy who was born in an orphanage whose director help women with unwanted pregnancy, practicing abortion and keeping the babies. The second is the life of Garp and his family. Both manage to mix a very droll writing with an analysis of the way people act and all their contradictions, and also the familial relationships which are one of the most complicated things in the world!

I don’t think books will disappear. Maybe it will be harder to edit books because in comparison with downloading it on the internet, it will be very expansive. But I hope that there will always be a fringe of the population who will need to take the book, to smell it, and turn the corners quickly, without having finished the page before in order to discover what will happen. Maybe, the birth of the iPad for example will become an alternative to books, because reading a book on it is almost like holding it. But I will always need something more, so I hope books won’t disappear, even if I can’t predict the future!