Sticks and Stones

NY Dispatch Day 161: I have always had a passion for books, but they became my companions during my childhood. Books allowed me to enter the insulated safety of another writer’s imagination. My hometown in rural New Jersey may have been bucolic, but it was no haven for readers. The nearest bookstore was at the mall more than an hour away and the town’s two-room library had a meager selection. Undeterred by the lack of literary choices, my mother and I became professional book vultures, able to r...