I'm not a very nice person. Most people would probably call me one anyway, but only because it's what you say when you don't know someone well enough to speak good or ill of them.

Honestly, most of the time I prefer the company of books to people. Actually I prefer the company of trees to people, while we're here being so up-front and all. I love my best friend, but even though she and her boyfriend are long distance now, they still manage to make me feel like the third wheel no one asked for. I do have other friends and school friends, but I can't see my actual friends as much as I would like to due to distance and not going to school together and whatnot, and my school friends are more akin to aquaintances, and that's being generous if you ask me.

I'm not easy to talk to, I guess, or maybe I just don't find talking all that easy. Whatever the reason, the people in my life don't really tend to know me all that well. But you're about to know a lot.

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1. You're reading this online, I know, but picture it like this instead:

You were browsing the shelves of your favourite bookstore, when a smallish volume, crammed hastily onto the bottom shelf of a bookcase tucked way in the back, caught your eye. You pick it up, out of sheer curiosity if nothing else. It's a hardback book with a green cover, the lettering on the front in plain brown type. On the front cover is a picture of the house you see in my profile picture. You turn it over to find: nothing. No summary, no author photo. No publisher, come to think of it. You flip through the pages, but most of them are empty. There's only a title page, followed by a dedication page bearing the words "Find me beneath the apple tree. I wait for you." There's also a first chapter, so you sink down into the nearest red armchair, plushy yet somehow perfectly firm, and begin to read this perplexing volume. This is where we are now. Do you follow me?

2. If you have a distaste for magic and stories about magic, this is not the book for you.

3. I hope you have a lot of free time, because we're in this for the long haul here. If you're unwilling to follow, put the book back where you found it please. Give someone with half a sense of adventure the chance to discover it.

Still here?

Really?

Great. Let's begin.

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Sneak the book out of the store. Don't worry, no one will notice. In case you didn't already guess, it isn't strictly speaking a regular bookstore-library-ordinary book you're holding. And don't worry about there only being one chapter. You'll find that as you read, the story writes itself.

Sincerely,

- the Dryad

(Postscript: if you were expecting a name, I'm surprised at you. Is the mystery not intriguing enough in itself? If you must, picture glasses, dark hair, and a face hidden behind a drawing of an apple tree, only with bright red books hanging from its branches in the place of delicious fruit. Satisfied? I hope not.)

There's magic everywhere, even (or perhaps especially) in ordinary events. Chances are, if you're reading this book you have at least some understanding of what I'm talking about.

Like when a grandfather clock strikes twelve times at midnight in an old, familar house, extra points if it's your grandparents' house on Christmas Eve.

Like turning your key in the lock of your front door, knowing beyond the possibility of any doubt that it's home and that you belong there and always will.

Like going to the library on a rainy Sunday, reading in a comfortable chair or browsing the shelves or just hanging out with friends and watching the raindrops slide down the windowpanes and hearing them collide with the tiles on the roof.

Like that hazy place somewhere in between wakefulness and falling asleep.

Like reading in your bedroom by candlelight, or under the covers by flashlight, feeling as though the entire world has ceased to exist save you and the story.

Like writing to strangers on the Internet, and knowing that your words will finally be truly heard and, you hope, understood and appreciated.

Like escaping into another world (metaphorically or literally) through a book or a song or a movie or a play or a painting or a walk in the woods.

There is a side to me, when I'm in one of my fanciful moods, where I believe wholeheartedly that everything in my world is touched by magic. There is another mood of mine where I feel too sensible for magic, too practical and reasonable to believe in anything at all other than hard work and the rewards it is supposed to bring. I'm sure there are millions and millions of moods in between these two, so maybe another example of everyday magic is the human mind.

Maybe ennumerating and analyzing these examples of everyday commonplace magic takes the magic out of them and renders them merely everyday and commonplace.

Maybe it does the exact opposite, making the magic easier to see and appreciate instead of seeing it as 'random good things' that can all too easily be taken for granted.

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I recommend a book for you, as I will probably do in most chapters of this book.

Dash and Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan. Another example of a story about books and magic. Also a good holiday read. There's a passage where a character remarks that he didn't know that he knew these things until he had a red notebook to write them in and someone to write them to. Maybe this will be my red notebook. If it is, I dare you to find and read it.

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Like looking up at the stars on a clear night.

Like re-watching your favourite TV show for the upteenth time, just to see your favourite old familar characters do their old familiar things, or re-reading an old favourite book just to exist in that world a little bit longer. Like doing that and noticing something new amidst the nostalgia.

Like a good, strong cup of tea on a cold, bitter day.

Like lightly falling snow.

Like the smell of spring.

Like a crackling fire.

Like reading Greek mythology.

Like a used bookstore (a used-book store?)

Like sentences with ambiguous meanings (see above).

Like a crisp, cool autumn day.

Like making things.

Like learning something new.

Like being different and not minding.

Like being alone and not caring.

Like the smell of the sea.

Like a perfectly preserved good childhood memory.

Like a warm sweater.

Like a long drive with the perfect stock of CDs.

Like crossing the last item off a to-do list, or leaving something unfinished.

Like the book version of the mini-scene after the credits of a movie.

It's been snowing all day today. I don't know about you, but personally I've always loved the way trees look in winter, bare of leaves and covered in snow and ice. The world becomes completely transformed in winter. You can stay inside, cosy with sweaters and hot chocolate and tea, and watch it from your window. You can experience it firsthand, shoveling or skating or building snowmen or making snow angels or just looking up at the sky and letting snowflakes fall onto your tongue.

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The only thing to dislike about winter is the silence. Your footsteps get muffled with the powdery snow, the birds migrate and aren't heard or seen again until spring. And if there's no one about, all you hear is the wind. Makes you want to start screaming.

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If I was a tree, I could stand out there, stretch out my arms, dance in the wind. I could feel my naked boughs be covered in white snow, allow my branches, my fingers, to freeze and be enclosed in ice, and sleep until spring, until the soil thawed my roots and warm breezes blew away the winter chill. I would once again shelter birds and squirrels under my wooden wings and protect them as the cool rain washed over me. My leaves would return one by one.

That's the best part about winter. The anticipation of spring.

Two stories:

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The cat sat on her blanket in her favourite spot: the window seat in the front room of the house. From her perch she observed the comings and goings of all the residents of Appletree Lane, though for now the street was silent enough to allow the cat to devote attention to other things. A minute pair of gold-rimmed spectacles were perched on the tabby’s nose, in danger of slipping down the edge of her muzzle. The cat was immersed in Mr. Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers, having just finished Something Fresh by P. G. Wodehouse, the worn copy of which lay on the floor beside the window seat. Twitching her tail, the cat read on, waiting for the rest of the house to wake up.

Outside, the trees whispered to each other as they danced in the wind. Some fresh scandal had been committed, no doubt, so on they gossiped. Only an elderly birch held herself still, primly refusing to partake in the trees’ enjoyment of repeating secrets belonging to the private lives of others. If she had had a head she would have shaken it in disapproval at those foolish young trees less respectable than herself. Saplings, she sniffed, mere saplings who couldn’t keep their branches out of other peoples’ business even if threatened with an axe.

It was early, the pale grey light of dawn still not ready to give way to the sun’s warm glow. The cat was reading her book by lamplight. The trees’ roots were covered by the first frost. The people of Appletree Lane slept. No one realized it, not one living soul on the whole street could feel it, but it was there anyway. There was a subtle sense of a world waiting for something to happen, the feeling that something was amiss, that all was about to change and the natural way of things would not hold much longer before being disrupted. What was it?

Of course.

If someone was looking for it, it could just barely be felt: In the air there was decidedly the scent of magic, and where magic was present adventure was never far behind.

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She lived in a world of words.

____

Everything she wrote became real. Slowly, slowly, as she wrote she could feel something beginning. A world was being created. Under her hand, in the space between ink and paper, lived thousands of animals and plants and people that she had created.

The sky was blue and it was made of words. The trees, strange as they were, were beautiful and unique and they were made of words. The grass was soft underfoot, the breeze warm, the air crisp, and all was made of words.

She had never seen this land, nor met its people, but she knew everyone who lived there and everything that happened.

Castles were built, destroyed, and they were made of words. Wars were fought and they were made of words. Words shaped and created and burned and erased this world.

Words were in the air here. Every action was described, every spoken sentence recorded. No one could think without it being noted.

_____

She was in the garden. She sat on a bench, her arms folded and her eyes shut. The word-flowers gave off a light, sweet aroma; the word-sparrows hopped and skipped and sang. The trees swayed in their word-breeze, their word-leaves rustling softly. The path was made of stone and cement and words. She awoke from her reverie on cue and got to her feet. Her feet were also made of words, and so was she, and the path she walked on and the air she breathed.

_____

He read. He followed her as she walked, though he never saw her. He imagined the word-flowers and the word-trees and the word-girl. He read her thoughts. He read as she followed her story. Her author was fond of rambling, he noted, and smiled. He couldn’t tell where the story began here, nothing had happened yet. Of course, he was barely past the first page. He would find her, he thought, closing his eyes gently. He could see her as she walked. She turned around, her eyes beckoning him closer, asking him to follow her, let her lead the way. He wondered where they were going.

_____

There was another girl, somewhere else. She sat and wrote. She wrote the word-girl as she word-walked. The boy was also made of words, though he did not know it. He was reading the word-girl’s story, but somewhere the other girl was writing his. She was the one who had written this world of words. She wrote it, he read it, she lived in it. He lived in another world made of words.

She stopped, tired of writing for the moment. She would write again later. She would make new worlds of words, and wonder if her world was of words as well.

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There are many different sorts of books, if you know what I mean by that.

Not as in fiction, non-fiction, romances, fantasy, biography, and so on. That's convenient enough for libraries or even personal collections of books, but it is admittedly rather unimaginative. It would be like sorting people by height, weight, hair colour and so on. However useful that might be in certain instances, it doesn't tell you a damn thing about the person themselves. I mean winter books and summer books and books best read alone and books that are best if read to you and books you share only with your closest friends and books that you're quite certain only you rightly understand.

Take The Wind in the Willows, for instance, or the works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Dickens and Tolstoy. Even though the first on the list begins in spring, you feel instinctively upon opening it that it would be better read in winter, while with the others it's clear that they're made to be enjoyed by a crackling fire when it's cold as death outside and the snow is softly falling.

P.G.Wodehouse's books are ideal for summer holidays, spread out in the grass under a particularly shady tree when there's a breeze in the air. Same goes for Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men on a Boat, or pretty well anything by L.M. Montgomery.

Take a look outside, and see what reading material would best complement your state of mind and the present climate. Is there a thunderstorm in your head, even though it may be a fine day? Is the suffocating heat or bone-chilling cold threatening to strip the brisk autumn air out of your thoughts? I pity you then. There are times when I marvel that anybody could hate to read, and times when settling down with a book seems an impossible task.

I'd recommend The Last Bookaneer and Between the Lines for nearly everyone who enjoys reading. Books that are about books might fatigue some, for good reasons or otherwise, but I'll always find them brilliant.

Perhaps I ought to sleep. It's all well and good to call books your air and food and blood, to compare reading to intimate conversation with a close friend, and say that you'd sooner read than sleep any day of the year, but in practice the poetry tends to fade quickly.