Double Life – Books Time

By Daniela Fubini

People who divide the timeline of their lives among different continents have some adjustment to make when it comes to the more trivial timeline of a single year.

For example, May is for me the month of the books. Since when I was growing up, in Turin, it is the “holy month of the book fair”. At the time, Turin was far from being the cool place it has later become. The opposite: all I remember is painted in gray just like now everything – buildings and people alike – sport all the colors of the rainbow. It was still the FIAT Torino, a place for working people and not too much fun. But that week in May was the coolest happening, at least for avid readers like me. I used to spend long hours at the huge fair grounds, getting lost in what looked like the largest bookstore I could dream of. I remember endless handwritten lists of books to find, and heated discussions on which editor had the best smelling books, and we are talking about glue here, not Chanel n.5.

Now that Kikar Rabin, in the heart of Tel Aviv and 2.5 minutes’ walk from my doorstep, gets its little cute book fair every summer, I tend to avoid it. In my first years I used to wander around the small stands, look at the editors names, try to navigate the titles and names of authors. Then I realized that reading a whole book is not something I can do before I have enough time to really focus on grammar again, and I postponed the surely fulfilling experience to the golden age of retirement. I hope that by then some super-cool start-up will come up with a device providing instant translation inside my google (or not-google) glasses of anything I will be reading.

Yes, no matter the season, in Israel you can always call for a new technology that will make life better. It usually happens, and quite quickly too.

*Daniela Fubini (Twitter @d_fubini) lives and writes in Tel Aviv, where she arrived in 2008 from Turin via New York.