I Heart Reading

It would not be an exaggeration to say that books are my favorite thing in the world (defining “thing” as something nonliving and non-digestible of course).  This has been so since I’ve been able to read, certainly since I’ve been reading “chapter books” in first or second grade.  I don’t know why this is.  I don’t remember there being a choice; I just loved books, and I love them now. 

I’m an only child who never had a speck of interest (or skill) in athletics.  I was always imaginative and I guess it was easy and fun for me to imagine what I was reading about.  My father died suddenly when I was twelve, and in my grief and confusion, books were my escape (this word sounds cheesy to me too).  I didn’t stop paying attention to life, but I did stop paying attention to school.  My avid reading had already reached new heights (in sixth grade I fell in love with Agatha Christie books which, at that age, I found to be very sophisticated and adult).  But the combination of grief and junior high school was enough to amplify the reading even more.  Escapism, diversion, suspense . . . As I got older I read more difficult, intellectual things.  I guess it was an experimental teenage phase.  Now, as a adult, I appreciate nothing more than a well-crafted page-turner.  Long past are the days when I, for instance, attempted to read Joyce’s Ulysses (I didn’t make it past page 200).

I once read something Stephen King said- I believe in was in Danse Macabre and, as I read this over a decade ago, I may be poorly paraphrasing, but I don’t think I’m making it up.  He said that reading and writing is the closest thing he knows of to ESP.  One person thinks something, envisions something, and they put it in writing – these abstract symbols most of us can decipher – then someone else reads it and they transfer the symbols into visions, thoughts and images, in their head.  This obviously stayed with me, and I’ve thought about it over the years.  For me it crystallizes how magical books and writing can be.  The fascinating thing – this is true more of fiction perhaps than non-fiction – is that no two people reading a book will envision it (the world, the characters) alike (as far as we know).  We can never see what others pictured, even if we’ve read the same books.

It really is amazing: a writer fills pages with letters and words then a reader translates these abstract symbols in their brain into images, thoughts, worlds they may never forget.  And the writer has no control over the world the reader made and no two readers make the same world . . . to me it is MAGIC.