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

by Anne Bogel

I’m grateful for my one life, but I’d prefer to live a thousand—and my favorite books allow me to experience more on the page than I ever could in my actual life. 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.

Books draw us deeply into the lives of others, showing us the world through someone else’s eyes, page after page.

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

William Morris famously wrote, “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

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

For readers, the great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other readers you’ve been. Sometimes you think fondly of the readers you used to be; sometimes looking back makes you cringe a little. But they’re still here. They’re still you.

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.