The Art of Reading

Sometimes I have nothing to read. It seems that with the millions of books out there I will never find another. In the last few weeks I have started and put down four or five books. Some I read half way through and lost interest in them.

Yesterday morning I spent an hour at the library and left with seven novels. I began one last night, The Wife by Meg Wolitzer, a book from 2003. I am halfway through and I will finish it. In the midst of my dry spell, I felt like I would never find a book again that I wanted to read cover to cover.

I like reading novels because for a time someone else's life is more important than your own. You leave your own story and sink deeply into another. They take centre stage while you magically disappear. You are lifted out of your own life. A spell is cast and you are safely ensconced.

All you have to do to reappear is lift your head. Magic. 

Over my life I have gotten lost in cities all around the world, wandered through deserts in World War II, sat frozen on the ice floes off Newfoundland all through books. They transport me. The words ignite my imagination and I sometimes follow authors anywhere they want to take me.

Then every once in a while I cannot get anyone to take me anywhere. I am solidly self focused in my own world and books seem an annoyance. I start one, put it down and pick up another. For days, even weeks at a time. When I was younger I had long dry spells from reading, a few months at times. I remember saying to my sister Joan, "I haven't been reading." She would always say reassuringly, "You'll get back to it."

For the last ten years it has been very steady. I might stop for a few weeks or read a book slowly, but reading has been there for me.

When I get a book that I really like and read it really quickly, when I devour it, that is often when I have trouble finding another. For a while after that everyone's writing feels a little stilted. Like they are all putting on the dog at a party, and I am still remembering that other party where everyone was so much themselves. Where we all sat around and told the truth.

So I wander off and look at the bookshelves. And I really do. I pick out piles of books, knowing that in there somewhere is the book that will make me fall in love with reading again. The one that will carry me away to some place I have never been. The one that will make me look at relationships differently, or see qualities in people that I never noticed before. 

There is this world beyond me that I enter and leave with ease. It is the world of story. I like having it there for me on a bedside table to carry me into dreams of my own.