My big brother and sister-in-law were kind enough to ask me to do a reading during their wedding ceremony last night. We joked about me pulling the reading from my own book, but there’s nothing really wedding appropriate in TBIB at all, plus I’m conscious about being that person.

Instead, I read a wonderful passage from Louis de Bernières’ Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a subtle shout out to my family’s Greek heritage. I love the book, and, as I said in my introduction to the reading, ‘it is a beautiful story of love and war and Mussolini and syphilis, so perfectly apt for a wedding.’ Here is what I read (affixed to the back of a copy of TBIB because everyone loves a good self-promotional jape.)

“When you fall in love, it is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake, and then it subsides. And when it subsides, you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots are to become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the desire to mate every second of the day… For that is just being in love; which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over, when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident.” – Louis de Bernières, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

As for the rest of the wedding, I danced as if no one was watching which made all the people who were watching laugh.