Gifted Borders

Because I think the copywriting team at Borders are a group of absolute geniuses, I thought I'd share two paragraphs about reading I just enjoyed from their March 2006 Fiction e-mail newsletter.

Sometimes it's a comfort to pick up a book and enter the life of a character not so much unlike one's self, with a life not unlike one's own, facing challenges that are all too familiar. There is a calming sense of empathy that emanates from the well-written quotidian tome, a sigh of relief when each of us encounters a character with whom we can almost completely identify. On other occasions, escapism is the order of the day, and nothing thrills us more than entering times, places, or realities that we find thoroughly…well…novel. How invigorating, and edifying, to tool around Venice with a courtesan and a dwarf, to learn that Death sports mint-green golf wear, to find interspersed within pages of text a graphic novel inspired by Dante.