First Me, the Reader

In my first memory of being lost in a book, I’m seven, reading as I walk home from school because I can’t bear to leave the world of the story. I see my small self: head down, book open. A railroad track runs beside the street; raggedy, knee-high weeds grow between the track and where I walk. Cars whoosh by; I don’t look. Even now, I feel the happy weight of the book in my hands. What book? I have the vague idea it was about brownies. Not the scouting kind, though I was a Brownie at the time and loved my brown uniform, especially the beanie. But the kind of brownies in fairy tales.

That book I read when I was seven, whatever it was, gave me the first experience of traveling to a whole new world, living there—and I was hooked.

Thousands of books, thousands of hours later, I feel exactly the same way. I’ve read on chairs, sofas, beds, floors and park benches. In cars, cafes. On boats, buses, trains, and airplanes. In bathtubs and ticket lines. On lounge chairs or blankets near lakes and oceans and swimming pools. Cooled by the breeze on porches, warmed by cozy fireplaces.  In theaters, waiting for a performance to start; in waiting rooms of every kind. Surreptitiously during meetings (live and Zoom).     

I read actual hold-in-your-hands books. I read on my Kindle, which I tuck into my bag, loaded with a selection of novels just in case a moment opens up; if I’m not carrying a bag, I read the tiny text of novels on my iPhone. I read listening—driving, cleaning, shopping, doing yard work, walking the dog.

These days, I can read almost 24/7. As Kurt Vonnegut might say, “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

But lest you think being a voracious reader is wholly admirable: I was halfway through James Michener’s big, fat novel The Drifters when I went into labor with my second daughter Kate and, once she was born, spent considerable time during my hospital stay reading, the book propped on a pillow. I’m guilty of countless other deficits of attention due to being lost in a book, which I won’t go into here.

Maybe you’re as nuts as I am about books. Maybe you love them more sensibly.

Either way, don’t you wonder sometimes what you’re supposed to do with the feelings and ideas and questions a really good book dredges up, the laugh-out-loud-lines, the moments that blew your mind, made you cry—or changed you? Don’t you want to share it with someone you know will love it, too?

Here’s hoping you find some books you love here, at Word Pilgrim.

Feel free to share your thoughts about them.

And don’t hesitate to recommend a book you love!

---