Man called ‘book murderer’ for slicing long books in half to make them easier to carry

Alex Christofi's books sliced in half
Would you do this to your books? (Picture: Alex Christofi)

A man is dividing the internet after revealing that he cuts long books in half to make them more portable.

Alex Christofi posted the picture of the carved up books on Twitter – and people feel really strongly about it.

‘Yesterday my colleague called me a “book murderer” because I cut long books in half to make them more portable. Does anyone else do this? Is it just me?’ tweeted Alex.

Alex Christofi
‘The book is just a mortal husk, it’s the story itself that is the soul’ (Picture: Alex Christofi)

In his defence, the books he has chosen to hack in half are pretty hefty.

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace has 1,079 pages. Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time by Joseph Frank has a huge 2,500 pages.

So, if you’re reading on-the-go you can understand why carting all that weight around all day might not be too appealing.

‘It’s more about the unwieldiness,’ Alex tells Metro.co.uk. ‘When you are armpit-deep in another commuter at Oxford Circus, there is no part of you that wants to whip out your copy of Ducks, Newburyport.’

Which seems fair enough. But the book purists are not happy.

‘I hate everything about this,’ said Aimee in the comments under the Twitter post.

‘You legit scare me,’ added Joan.

I’m pretty sure you can get arrested for this,’ said Jimmy.

But Alex, who is an author himself (his new novel is called Let Us Be True) says this system of book butchery ensures that he reads the books that otherwise would have been languishing on his shelf.

‘I used to find that I almost never read long books,’ Alex tells us. ‘I would buy them and they would sit on my shelf and I wouldn’t take them outside.

‘This way they actually get read, which is surely the best compliment I can pay an author.’

Alex says cutting his epic volumes into bitesize chunks simply makes them more readable, and more sharable. And he’s struggling to understand the outrage.

‘I just want an efficient mechanism for getting more good words into my skull,’ he adds.

But not everyone’s against it. Some people commented under the post saying it was a genius idea:

‘I really like this Alex, and am completely ok with it,’ said Rhiannon. ‘In fact, it undercuts their hubris in writing such a bloody long book in the first place.’

But the overwhelming majority appear to be deeply unsettled by the segmented books, with lots of people asking why he doesn’t just invest in a Kindle and leave the poor books alone?

‘To the haters, I would say: the book is just a mortal husk, it’s the story itself that is the soul,’ says Alex.

So what do you think about this divisive reading hack? Genius or blasphemous?



source https://metro.co.uk/2020/01/21/man-called-book-murderer-slicing-long-books-half-make-easier-carry-12095000/
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