Although i grew up with books and having spent a good deal of my adult life among them, make my living out of writing them and very much enjoy writing about them, i can contemplate with equanimity the science-fiction future world that every day approaches more closely, in which information and narrative pleasure are transmitted electronically and books are a quaint antiquarian, minority taste. Not in my time, anyway, i say to myself. And, anyway, a book is simply the container of an idea - like a bottle; what is inside that book is what matters. Even so, i admit to having fetishistic attitude to books, to their touch, their smell. All the same, human beings told each other stories, instructed one another in the names of things, speculated about the meaning of it all (and came to few if any conclusions), discussed the habits of animals, composed recipes, before there was such a thing even as writing and will doubtless continue to do so because the really important thing is narrative.All books, even cookery books and car-maintenance manuals consist of narratives. Narrative is written in language but is composed, if you follow me, in time, All writers are inventing a kind of imitation time when they invent the time in which a story unfolds, and they are playing a complicated came with our time, the reader's time, the time it takes to read a story. A good writer can make you believe time stands still.
Angela Carter, Expletives Deleted, 1992
