Once I was in a bookstore or a bookshop. Let’s say it was yesterday that I was in this bookstore or bookshop. There was this book on the shelf and I thought, “This looks like a great book.” I picked it up. I dropped it. That was an accident. I turned it over and looked at it from all the different perspectives. I counted five different perspectives (the minister perspective, the little doggie perspective, the alien perspective, the homeless perspective, and the inanimate object that sometimes gets mistaken for something real with thoughts and feelings perspective)

Here is what each perspective told me:

The minister perspective didn’t tell me anything. It kind of just stared at the book and mumbled. A little dribble fell from its lips and it twiddled its thumbs after a while.

The little doggie perspective was interesting because it was panting and excited and seemed to want to run around and bark and claw at the rug and be cute, but its sense of literature was very limited and barely brought anything to the table that I didn’t already know in terms of this book—

[Note: I guess I should tell you what book I grabbed. It was Submarine by Joe Dunthorne.]

—and the dog also expected me to throw it the tennis ball for a half hour which was really inconvenient considering we were in a bookstore or bookshop.

The alien perspective was probably the best of all. It totally degraded the idea of written words and kept questioning how we hadn’t been able to figure out the intricacies of telepathy.

The homeless perspective was the most courteous of all and seemed to be genuinely intrigued by the book, going as far as opening the front cover and reading the first page.

The inanimate object that sometimes gets mistaken for something real with thoughts and feelings perspective was boring and probably only interesting in theory.