ທະວີບ

there's a book that I've never yet read the whole of, but I've always felt like, more than any other book I know, you can read a section from this book and it's satisfying in itself...each section you read is like a segment of a mandarin - delicious and self-contained. 

it was that quality that made me buy the book. I'd never heard of it before, but I picked it up and read part and really liked it. I actually did have a similar experience with another book - The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath || but this other book I'm referring to is Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life (2010) by Brenda Walker. It's about her reading experiences and thoughts when she was being treated for cancer. 

Here's an example - arbitrarily picked - of what I mean about the self-contained quality of this book. She's writing about The Tale of Genji and modern day Kyoto, and in the midst of that there's this:

We wouldn't have a passion for storytelling if we cared only for the world of facts, because storytelling is a way of adjusting the facts, of lending some and not others weight and significance, of arranging them in a time and an order that we determine for ourselves. 

That observation is anchored into her story, but you don't need the story to make sense of it. If you just read that quote and nothing else, you would have something to think about - you would have taken something away from the book. 

and like I said, i get that sense from the whole book. ironically, that quality of not needing to read the rest of the book makes you want to read the rest of the book.