Here is a thing about me: books. I love them. Actually, love is not quite the right word. I respect books. I admire them. Books make me happy: the smell of a book, the rustle of a page, new books with shiny, hard covers and books with no covers at all, books with worn spines that fall open by themselves to a favorite page when you pick them up, books encased in pristine plastic wrappers just waiting to be opened. To me, heaven is a Barnes and Noble bookstore where I can read all day and never have to leave, complete with a cute little dark-haired, dark eyed barista who keeps me permanently supplied in chai lattes and rubs my shoulders when I sit too long in one place.In the mansion of my dreams, there is a bright, sunny room crammed `with books from floor to ceiling and I ride a book ladder around on the shelves like Belle in "Beauty and the Beast." I know, I know: I'm hopeless. A pathetically enamored bibliophile with a little too much time on her hands and a fresh batch of books from the local library inviting me to dive into them like water and stay up swimming in words around the clock. I've been this way for as long as I can remember.
Books were an escape for me when I was a child: somewhere, on some page in some book, I could find someone whose life was worse than mine, or whose life was so much like mine I could tell what their dreams were, what they thought and how they felt. Oddly, the life of the empath I now lead started in the pages of books. I honed my natural skill on fictional characters; they taught me how to read pain in myself, and now I read it in others. A tic, a glance, a shift of the eyes -- it doesn't take much until I'm sharing your energy. I read people. I read books. It's become almost the same thing, now.
Books were also tactical manuals for me. I was drawn to the stories of survival against the odds, stories of people who crawled through Hell and came out holding their souls in their hands like trophies no one expected them to have won. I cut my teeth on the classics: Bambi, The Secret Garden, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Rawling's The Yearling, Watership Down. I plowed through Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, Cannery Row. I read Faulkner, Twain and Hawthorne. In high school, I clung to The Canterbury Tales, Leaves of Grass, and Dante's Inferno like I would drown at sea without them. In college, as an English major, I read Beowulf, Chanticleer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. A little while later, I fell in love with poetry like it had been waiting around for eons just for me to discover it and delighted in Maya Angelou, Adrienne Rich, e.e. cummings, and the incredible works of gut and viscera and superhuman fortitude born of the Harlem Renaissance.
These days it's much the same. I just finished Ambrose Bierce's The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary. I'm working on Maya Angelou's All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes. I've read Lillian Faderman's Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers and Walter Wangerin's The Book of God: The Bible as A Novel. I've also found a liking for well-written fantasy and science fiction. The Firebird anthologies are a wonderful treat. I like historical fiction a great deal as well: Anita Diamante's The Red Tent held me absolutely spellbound. Today at the library I picked up The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant. It looks splendidly toothsome. I've also developed a certain enthusiastic affection for Young Adult novels. Some of them are crap -- totally unoriginal dime-a-dozen-novels about fairies and vampires and chicks locked up in towers, you know, where you can smell the plot line from down the block before you even make it into the library and come across the book. But some of them are really, really good. This is All: The Pillow Book of Cordelia Kenn by Aidan Chambers was so good the first time I read it that I've plunged into it once more, even though it's monstrously huge and takes forever to read and I already know I'll be slightly pissed off at the ending. Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak is incredible, as are Nancy Farmer's The Ear, The Eye and the Arm and A Girl Named Disaster.
Anyhow, I'm not listing all these books to make myself look impressive or anything. I genuinely want to share them, to shove them into your hands going, "Read this. And this." Books shaped my life. From books, I learned the languages of survival and hope and persistence. I learned characters, knew them like kin and talked to them when I was lonely. A few will always be dear to me: Laura Ingalls, Hitty, the antique doll from Rachel Field's novel Hitty, Her First Hundred Years, Ada Price from Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. I honestly don't think I'd have made it through my childhood without books, and I am thankful that when God closed the door that was my physical ability, God opened wide a bank of windows that led me to books, and to the understanding and comprehension and admiration of books. Books, my friends, are good for the soul: because every once in awhile, everyone needs to escape to a place where an entire universe can exist on the back of a turtle, where children talk to lions and magic is real. So go, go, and do yourself a favor! Pick up a book! You never know: it might change you.
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