Ruth Ozeki "Is it odd to see a book within a book?"

Is it odd to see a book within a book? It shouldn't be. Books like each other. We understand each other. You could even say we are all related, enjoying a kinship that stretches like a rhizomatic network beneath human consciousness and knits the world of thought together. Think of us as a mycelium, a vast subconscious fungal mat beneath a forest floor, and each book a fruiting body. Like mushrooms, we are a collectivity. Our pronouns are we, our, us.

Because we're all connected, we communicate all the time - agreeing, disagreeing, gossiping about other books, name-dropping, and quoting each other - and we have our preferences and prejudices, too. Of course, we do! Biases abound on library shelves. The scholarly tomes disparage the more commercial books. Literary novels look down on romance and pulp fiction, and there's almost a universal disregard for certain genres, like self-help.

Ozeki, Ruth. The Book of Form and Emptiness. Viking, 2021: 94.