Here Comes the Next Contestant

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier was my book of choice. The type therein is small and extremely close, so I'll have to read it twenty to thirty pages at a time, lest my eyes rebel, but that prologue is the magical, lyrical prose of which a writer's dreams are made. It's sublime, staggering in its impact, and it either came about in a single masterstroke of inspiration or is the end result of fifty-six rewrites, a bottle of good booze, and untold creative agonies. Writing like that should be placed in a time capsule for the aliens to find when we've destroyed ourselves in a frenzy of selfishness and petty hatreds and the world has been reduced to irradiated dust. It might be the only surviving proof that we were also capable of profound beauty.