"The Book of Sand" is a novel about the infinite, beginning with a seemingly unrelated description of the uncountability of the grains of sand in the world. The titular Book of Sand the narrator receives is the central symbol of the book, and a mysterious one. Having no beginning or end, and written in a language the narrator cannot understand, the book is framed as fascinating and diabolical. It has no obvious reason for its value: it's an unreadable book. But it clearly has some mystical power, which leads the book seller and the narrator to both view it as highly valuable. The story leads us to question what makes people consider a book valuable. The Book of Sand is compared to Bibles, which also brings to mind the question of how people treat a copy of the Bible as valuable or not. It's one of the most printed books in the world, and many groups exist to distribute Bibles as a technique to proselytize. But many individuals have deep connections to their specific copies of the Bible, or to family Bibles passed down through generations. We can also think of how many people rarely or never read the Bible but might still have a copy they treasure or have an identity tied up with Christianity and the Bible.
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