My Plan Is To Eat The Books

My plan is to eat the books.

Who will care? After all, no one reads books anymore.

Well, I suppose that's not completely fair. Of course, people still obtain words collected together into digital files designated as intellectual property for which the consumer agrees that said consumer does not own said commodity, but have only purchased the right to run their eyes along the herein lines of Arial—or Times New Roman, for they do have that choice—font-faced type.

But actual, physical, glue and thread, creased-spine books? No. Not those space-wasting, dust collecting, dog-eared, pressed flower keepers.

So it is a perfect plan.

The power has been off for five days now. Five days is a sort of threshold as the vast majority of people have generators of some kind, but by now they are beginning to tire of the reek of gasoline, the ear-splitting machine gun engine, and the queue of family members bickering over who is next in line to charge a device. So once day five hits, nerves are as raw as the spoiling meat in the large useless boxes no longer able to freeze the contents and keep the parent flies and their maggot infants away.

I don't own a generator. I don't own the sun either, but it is working just fine. Or at least for six to twelve hours a day. No one pays a power bill and no one knows how to shut it off, so that old orb just keeps on doing what ancient suns do. And that is enough for me.

Water is the other difficulty for most. And that does concern me. I need water as much as any living thing. But water also comes from the sky and is completely free when it does. And I have access to an underground storage unit complete with a filtering system into which the precious liquid has been, for many, many years, collecting itself. So dehydration isn't in my vocabulary.

The one problem is food.

By this time good, sustaining, viable and appealing food is running low for everyone. My kin have a unique talent in making use of a good source of nutrition, but our culinary preferences are not to the taste of most. When people had kitchens full of electric and electronic devices to chop and mince and sous vide and flame broil, they could afford to be snobbish about what they put in their mouths. But as the stores dwindle, the world is coming into a humility that proves my people and our ways were right all along.

Our ways. I can't consider our sacred traditions without a pang of sad regret. After all, our unique approach to the nourishment of good, hearty food has been dying out. One might be willing to go the full distance and proclaim them—and us—fully dead and defeated.

But that would be premature.

For there are always—somewhere, somehow—books to eat.

Not great ones, you must understand. Not the chewy, moist, luscious kind that challenge the teeth and linger in the bloodstream. Not the tons of tomes, the endless supply of first editions, reprints, signed copies, book club editions, reading copies, many outliving their original owners and starting new lives in second-hand charity shops to be reincarnated endlessly.

In my short life, I can't claim to have ever eaten a truly fine book. I imagine that my noble ancestors who feasted in the libraries of the great royal houses of centuries past would today clutch their pearls in horror to see the pathetic scraps their progeny survive upon in the 21st century. I would be lying to you if I said I didn't often dream of a leather-bound delicacy with starchy pages lovingly infused with the fragrant oils of human hands.

But one shouldn't complain. After all, the physical books of my lifetime are still made with a delicate floured crust of glue binding and crispy cellulose pages. And although it may not sound so appetizing, those recipes are nourishing enough to keep body and soul together.

But now the power is off.

And books are about to become much, much more tasty.

First, my plan is to go after the books forgotten in muggy attics. Within a few more days without temperature control, those will transform into quick-growing gardens of the savory mushroomy mold, a specialty sort of spore that calls to my people like the beat of a war drum.

Next, the dusty display shelves of spines crammed against each other like bodies stacked in a morgue, all those collected by the hold-out analog enthusiasts who believed one day they would find fifty lifetimes to read the purchases made over years and years of perusing and admiring and acquiring. Yes, these bookworms are still out there. But their warrens of frozen thoughts were never thawed and seasoned and crafted into their own marvelous thoughts to be presented in their own sculpted words and published as new books to be admired and acquired and thawed to begin the cycle of creative invention over again. So, those shelves and shelves of untapped possibilities shall satisfy me and my myriads of aunts and uncles and cousins for years to come.

And last? The final conquest shall be the greatest antiquarian feast, as our millions descend upon the curated collections called libraries and research facilities and—imagine it!—museums. All that forbidden fruit, firstly considered uninteresting, then unfunded, and lastly, unprotected. The ultimate culinary quest. And then, finally, I will experience, for the first time in my humble six-legged life, the song of my ancestors, the ones who conquered the banquets of Alexandria, Pergamum, and Constantinople. And in our newfound joy, yes, I and all my kind, a great army of insect mouths, advancing, relentless, consuming, word by word, the Library of Congress.

In all this joyous intake that is to come for me and my kind, I pity you. After all, you have never learned how to eat a book, have you? Well, if not, I can't do a thing to help you, other than to assure you what you fear will come to pass:

You will starve for lack of knowledge.