My mother indulged me in the strangest ways. Through most of middle school, there were times when I'd skip a day of school -- claiming to be sick -- and instead go to the school where my mother taught. I'd hang out in the library all day and inhale stories. Some were familiar old ones, others were new. Looking back I wonder what the librarian made of it, how and why I was allowed to do this two or three times each year. No one censored my reading. I could borrow as much delicious fiction as I wanted; at my own school, students were only allowed one story and one textbook each week.
Stacks of books are still my comfort spots. In my twenties, big decisions -- college applications, graduate school woes, friend troubles -- always led me back to bookstores. Alone in the US, I'd drive to Barnes and Noble late in the evenings just to reconnect. Run my fingers over the spines, like touching the fingertips of old friends. Open a book, any book, and the familiarity of print was enough to comfort. I'd find the quietest row, lean back against the books and surround myself with stacks of stories. My makeshift fort of fiction was where I remembered how to be strong and safe and sure.
It's been years since I've been able to take a day off from the world just to read. A day when food appears, clothes are washed, chores can wait, and all that lies before me is the open road to a story world. It's gotten worse lately. Ask me my hobbies and reading tops the list. But ask what I've read lately, what I'm reading now, and the answers slip back to what I read months or a year or two ago.
In part, this is the narrowing that comes with age: there are fewer authors I will tolerate, less genres I'm likely to crack open. But it's made me worry. How could the people I was -- the child who ran to libraries for comfort, a woman who drove through snowstorms just to be with a bunch of books -- turn into someone who can't remember the last good thing she read?
Here's a secret: there's a book I'm halfway through that I love, the sort of love that makes me want to fall through the pages and live in this writer's mind forever. There's another one I just began that's brought wonder back to the world -- I will never look at the fingers on my own hand the same way again. But I haven't finished these. I don't even know where I put the first one. The other sits on my nightstand. Instead I'm racing through trashy romances, the kind with bad writing and pathetic characters that leave me feeling cheap afterward. Almost as if I'd rather indulge in one-night stands (and that's all it takes to get through these) than commit to an actual book.
And here's the real secret: I'm afraid to finish the good books. I'm scared to fall too deeply into story worlds, to lean too far back against their strength, simply because one problem that I struggled with isn't one I could solve or hide from by climbing into my story fort.
Reading -- the kind that leaves mind and heart sated for a while -- is I think an act of courage.
The stories I read gave me permission to be not just myself, but all of my selves. Introverted, confused, tall, plump -- whatever the adjective, there was always a story to tell me it would be okay. Books are doors into other worlds, but they were also a window into my own life. Crack one open, and I could climb back in and walk through my world on another road, one not accessible without the book-window. Allowing myself to simply read, to walk away through wardrobes, fly through a stranger's apricot tree, or hurtle through space with a robot for company, is an act of trust in the writer and myself. That if I take a day to lean into walls that turn into doors and be swept up in a story, tomorrow will be brighter -- there will be a different light, a new way through.
All readers have a book alter ego, I think. Mine was a headstrong girl who wanted to be a writer and blundered her way through life with little care for propriety. Her only real beauty was her hair. When mine started to fall out in clumps this year, I've wondered as I clean my pillowcase each morning: What would Jo do? (Yes, I turned to a fictional character from the last century for hair care advice). It took me months to remember the answer: She'd take a day off, settle into the garret with some apples, and read her worries away.
