I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life

by Anne Bogel

They’re not in the mood to take a chance; they’re looking for a sure thing—a book they’re guaranteed to love.

You’re looking for a book that reminds you why you read in the first place. One written well and that will feel like it was written just for you—one that will make you think about things in a new way, or feel things you didn’t expect a book to make you feel, or see things in a new light. A book you won’t want to put down, whose characters you don’t want to tell good-bye. A book you will close feeling satisfied and grateful, thinking, Now, that was a good one.

so much of the reading life is about the reader as an active participant.

But avid readers know a great book doesn’t exist only in the realm of the material. The words between those covers bring whole worlds to life.

We are readers. Books are an essential part of our lives and of our life stories.

For us, reading isn’t just a hobby or a pastime; it’s a lifestyle.

They call it the comedy gap, that gap between what we expect to happen and what actually happens. Or, in this case, what we expect a person’s reading life to be like and what it’s truly like.

They’re carrying guilty reading secrets that make them feel as though they aren’t real readers.

They wrote their term papers on Important Novels without reading the important novels. (The better their grade, the worse they feel.)

Oh, yes. SO MUCH YES. How many times did I do this?

Reader, whatever secret you’re keeping, it’s time to spill it. I’ll take your confession, but the absolution is unnecessary. These secrets aren’t sins; they’re just secrets. No

I didn’t know a book could do that to a person. I didn’t know I could care so much about events that happened on the page. I didn’t know an author could convince me—if only for a moment—that what happened there was real.

I don’t relish crying over a book, but I’ll say this: it’s not easy to earn a reader’s tears—and if an author writes well enough to earn mine, I’m in.

Can every devoted reader point back to the book that hooked them on the story? I’d like to think so. Not a book they appreciate, or grudgingly respect, but the one that captivated them, the one they didn’t want to put down, the one that made them decide, for themselves, to make reading a part of their life, forever.

Reorganizing my shelves has changed the way I think about books and the people who write them.

A good book allows me to step into another world, to experience people and places and situations foreign to my own day-to-day existence. I love experiencing the new, the novel, the otherwise impossible—especially when I can do it from my own comfy chair.

if my real life reminds me of something I read in a book, I’m reading well—and I’m probably living well, too.

To relish the twin delights of baffling your friends and finding your books, organize by Trivial Pursuit category.

You can’t put the book you just finished behind you because you still want to live it. You have a terrible book hangover, and it lasts three days. Ibuprofen does nothing for it. You’re sad because whatever you read next can’t possibly be as good as the book you just finished. You despair because nothing you read can possibly be as good, ever again.

You finish an amazing series and need to grieve that it’s over. You need to mourn the loss of a beloved character. You wonder why these events have no cultural markers, because you definitely need one.

L’Engle once wrote, “The great thing about getting older is you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.” She writes in The Irrational Season, “I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven . . . all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology.”

Just as I’m all the ages I have been, I’m all the readers I have been.

But then it happens. School is over, classes are done, and we become responsible for our own reading lives. Nobody else is in charge of what we read; those decisions are now all ours. Now we choose what kind of readers we want to be; we choose which pages will fill our lives.

Book lovers have strong feelings about bookish scents; some of us get poetic about the distinctive smell of freshly inked paper, or old cloth-covered hardcovers, or a used bookstore.

I was dismayed when I once read that more books are published on any given Tuesday than I could read in an entire year, and that’s just one Tuesday—and one year.

Old books, like old friends, are good for the soul. But they’re not just comfort reads.

When we revisit a book we’ve read before, we see how life has woken us up to understand passages that previously went over our heads.

A good book, when we return to it, will always have something new to say. It’s not the same book, and we’re not the same reader.

I have hopes and dreams for my kids, as parents do. I hope they’ll live right and live well, find love and fulfilling work, and not endure too much heartbreak on the way. And I also, specifically, hope that one day—when they’re old enough to choose for themselves, apart from me—they’ll discover that they too are book people.

Oh, how I want this for Samuel - not because he’d be like me, but because of the worlds it would open to him.

Good reading journals provide glimpses of how we’ve spent our days, and they tell the story of our lives.