Free The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald

swayed, she slowly opened the door.
    She sank down onto the bed and glanced around in amazement.
    Amy’s room was like her dream library. A large bed in the middle where Amy must have spent her days, slowly dying of her ‘silly little complaint’. Along each of the walls: bookcases. The bedside table was a pile of books. On top was a collection of aerial pictures of Iowa, covered in water rings from a glass.
    Someone had taken the glass away, made the bed and vacuumed, and there was a closed-in feeling to the room which couldn’t have been there while Amy was still alive.
    On one side there was a curtainless window, the only section of wall not covered by books. From where Sara was sitting, she could see a treetop swaying in the breeze. And she could see hundreds, maybe even thousands of books flickering in front of her as the room started spinning before her eyes.
    The books were a rainbow of colours; they were thin books, thick books, books with luxurious text and illustrations; cheap paperbacks, classic editions, old leather-bound volumes, incompatible genres. Sometimes sorted in alphabetical order, sometimes by genre, sometimes without any obvious system.
    She stayed where she was on the bed, looking on in astonishment as books and colours and life and stories soared up around her.
    Jane Austen was there, all of her works, as well as a biography and a book of collected letters. The three Brontë sisters were there too, but she seemed to have had a particular fondness for Charlotte: there were three different editions of
Jane Eyre
, a copy of
Villette
and a biography too. There were biographies of American presidents, even Republicans, and weighty tomes on the civil rights movement – a healthy balance of power and resistance.
    Paul Auster, Harriet Beecher Stowe, plenty of Joyce Carol Oates and a couple of Toni Morrisons. A copy of Oscar Wilde’s collected plays, a few Dickens, no Shakespeare. All the Harry Potters, hardback. On the next shelf, Annie Proulx, all the ones Sara had read – Proulx was one of her absolute favourites. There were hard and paperback copies of
The Shipping News
, the others were all well-thumbed paperbacks.
    A few Philip Roths, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender is the Night
, and a whole host of thrillers: Dan Brown, John Grisham and Lee Child, a discovery which pleased Sara almost as much as the Proulx.
    There was also some Christopher Paolini:
Eragon
,
Eldest
and
Brisingr
, and Sara was forced to pause there, slumping back down on the bed.
    Amy might not have had the most exciting life over the past few years, up here in her room, but she must have been fighting death to the very end. Sara could understand why she had been in denial for so long. It must have been a frightening realisation: so many books she would never get to pick up, so many stories which would happen without her, so many authors she would never get to discover.
    That night, Sara sat in Amy’s library for hours, thinking about how tragic it was that the written word was immortal while people were not, and grieving for her, the woman she had never met.

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    Broken Wheel, Iowa
    February 26, 2010
    Sara Lindqvist
    Kornvägen 7, 1 tr
    136 38 Haninge
    Sweden
    Dear Sara,
    I completely agree with what you say about the Bible: with so many interesting stories, it’s a shame no one edited it better. I do understand that it must’ve become tedious by the third and fourth gospels. By that point, you know fine well how it’s all going to end. I’ve always thought that the very best stories are in the Old Testament. What a God they had in those days. If my father had been willing to sacrifice me, I wouldn’t have taken it as a sign of religious integrity. Not that my father would have done. He was just like my brother Robert. Much too kind for his own good. Sometimes I think that Tom might have managed to escape that particular family trait. Don’t get me wrong,