Kind of a mirror to Bianca’s earlier instincts of “show care for Patrick by bringing him books.”
…except not in the sense that Lily’s caring for Timothy. He’s not special to Brother Alvah, therefore he’s not special to her. (Yet.)
No, what’s going on is, Alvah doesn’t share books with Lily. Doesn’t talk about the Bible with her, definitely doesn’t talk about his special secret books that nobody else in the compound gets to see.
She can’t read them herself, so the only way to get closer to her Master is to have someone else read them to her.
Lily: You’re ignoring me. Why?
Timothy: Um . . . I . . .
Lily: Did we run out of stories in the book?
Timothy: Yes! Yes, that’s it. We’re all out of stories.
Lily: There are more books in my Master’s room. If I get one of them, could we read that?
Sparrow: Uh-oh. I see where this is going. How many of the “secret books” were porn, and how creepy?
Timothy: . . . Some. Not as many as the breathless news reports would like to imply, but some. But I didn’t find out about that part until much later.
The first book Lily brought out to read wasn’t sexual at all, though it wasn’t exactly spiritual . . .
Right. It’s not like Lily is personally interested in the books. She wants to know what’s there to better understand her master.
Okay so I know you didn’t ask for one this time but, well. It seemed thematically appropriate.
https://imgur.com/a/qYYj6D3
Excellent addition!
I think there’s another implication here as well.
None of the other people in the compound were seen to be reading even the one book they were allowed. Either that, or they were more standoffish with the “angel”.
I spent a bit of time with my brother who kept getting involved with the protocults, during the time that he was involved with the first two. (To be clear, they were sequential. But I spent time with him during both of those times.) As proto-cults, they didn’t have compounds *yet*, but they did do summer retreats, and they were interested in inviting other people to them, and so the two summers before I started to consistently have summer jobs that precluded my involvement, I went to a couple of them, though never for the entire length of the retreat. I mean, I did have summer jobs, just not ones that didn’t give me enough time to be away for a few days.
I’m not Christian. While my parents certainly tried to raise me as one, this was past the time that I had realized that it wasn’t trustworthy.
And yet, even so, I found it notable that I was all but the only one reading the bible, and the other people who occasionally perused one in a common area where I could see were not doing it nearly as much.
Admittedly, I was looking for the context of the various sermons to know just how much of the fertilizer that the clergy were spewing was home grown, versus how much was traditional.
My brother was probably the second most frequent bible reader at those things, in part because I opted to ask him questions about the context that he couldn’t answer.
To be clear, my point is the people I knew who were in those proto-cults weren’t big readers. They didn’t have non-religious books there either. (I would not have put it past the organizers to have their own secret stashes, but I wasn’t a snoop, so I can only report on stuff that happened in public areas.)
I’m not trying to suggest that nobody in cults are big readers; the cult my other brother got in actually did focused bible study as their primary recruitment tool. I don’t have any experience with their techniques, though my brother did say that most of the members weren’t doing bible study on their own, and most of the members who were doing bible study on their own also left roughly when he did.