I recently came across this wonderful little book of essays by Anna Quindlen called How Reading Changed My Life. I know I should be reading the Michael Dirda book sitting on my nightstand, but this is such a gem of a book that I am glad I decided to read a little bit of it to get a taste (and now it has jumped ahead in the line, but I will definitely get back to the Dirda). It is a slim book--there are only four essays and several book lists at the end of the book, but the contents make it worth every penny that I paid for it. I always love reading about other people's experiences with books, it is always a nice affirmation that I am not alone in my bookish madness--there are other people out there exactly like me. And of course Anna Quindlen always expresses these feelings so well!
Books to me are another world. I can pick up a book and travel to another time, place, galaxy--live a different life. Anna Quindlen also thinks of books in terms of traveling.
"Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave. The buses took to the interstate without me; the trains sped by. So I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of Middlemarch and A Little Princess, and to Saint Petersburg before the fall of the tsar with Anna Karenina. I went to Tara, and Manderley, and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses, with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, and Jane Eyre."
She talks about "living within the covers of books and those books were more real to her than any other thing in her life". I have on occasion been so involved in a book (the last one being W&P, which felt very intense as that was all I was reading for weeks) that it too felt very real to me.
"The best part of me was always at home, within some book that had been laid flat on the table to mark my place, its imaginary people waiting for me to return and bring them to life. That was where the real people were, the trees that moved in the wind, the still, dark waters. I won a bookmark in a spelling bee during that time with these words of Montaigne upon it in gold: 'When I am reading a book, whether wise or silly, it seems to be to be alive and talking to me'."
When I was young I read a lot and also played outside with my friends. I must have had a good balance of the two as I don't recall my parents telling me to go outside and play (not to say that they never did, but I don't remember it happening). Anna Quindlen was quite often urged by her friends to stop reading and come out and play. The underlying thought being--you're wasting your time reading so much. (Sorry--this is going to be a long quote, but I can't help but share it all)
"While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness."
"There is something in the American character that is even secretly hostile to the act of aimless reading,a certain hale and heartiness that is suspicious of reading as anything more than a tool for advancement. This is a country that likes confidence but despises hubris, that associates the 'nose in the book' with the same sense of covert superiority that Ms. Winfrey's mother did*. America is also a nation that prizes sociability and community, that accepts a kind of psychological domino effect: alone leads to loner, loner to loser. Any sort of turning away from contact is suspect, especially one that interferes with the go-out-and-get-going ethos that seems to be at the heart of our national character. The image of American presidents that stick are those that portray them as men of action: Theodore Roosevelt on safari, John Kennedy throwing a football around with his brothers, There is only Lincoln as solace to the inveterate reader, the solitary figure sitting by the fire, saying 'My best friend is a person who will give me a book I have not read'."
I could quote more, but I better stop before I get myself into trouble. I am only sorry that there are a mere four essays in this book. I am going to have to ration them out to one every other day to make the book last!
*Earlier in the essay Quindlen mentioned a story that Oprah had shared that when she was young she was told by her mother to go out and play--did she think she was better than the other kids? How sad to be treated as though there was "something wrong with her because she wanted to read all the time". People who don't read obviously have no idea, do they?