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

by Anne Bogel

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.

We’re the kind of people who understand the heartbreak of not having your library reserves come in before you leave town for vacation and the exhilaration of stumbling upon the new Louise Penny at your local independent bookstore three whole days before the official publication date.

They ordered pizza so they could skip making dinner and finish their book. They ate cereal for dinner so they could finish their book. They forgot to eat dinner because they were finishing their book. The last time they finished a great story, the book hangover lasted three days.

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.

In books, we often encounter those things first, vicariously experiencing rites of passage on the page long before we live them for ourselves—we fall in love, or suffer a bad breakup;

lose a beloved pet, or a parent. We go to college, take on a new job, fight with a roommate, bicker with a spouse.

Books draw us deeply into the lives of others, showing us the world through someone else’s eyes, page after page. They take us to new and exciting places while meeting us right where we are, whisking us away to walk by the Seine or through a Saharan desert or down a Manhattan sidewalk. Books provide a safe space to encounter new and unfamiliar situations, to practice living in unfamiliar environm...

process triumph and fear and loss and sadness, to deal with annoying siblings or friend drama or something much, much worse. And when we get to that point in our real life when it’s happening to us, it’s not so unfamiliar. We’ve been there before, in a book. This ability to “preview” real-life experiences t...

“Have nothing in your houses that

you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

Author Anna Quindlen, who is to be trusted on such matters, wrote, “I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating

consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.” We are readers. This is how we decorate.

And what to choose? This is where my story, perhaps like all stories about reading, is intimately tangled up with place. When it comes to our reading lives, place matters, whether metaphorical or literal. I was in a place of transition and in a physical place where good books were easy to come by. And so I read.

for the smell of used bookstores myself, but as a devoted reader, I’ve noticed how the books themselves serve as portals to my past, conjuring similarly powerful memories. There’s something about glimpsing, and especially handling, a book from long ago that takes me right back to where I was when I first read it. The book triggers memories of why I picked it up, how it made me feel, what was going on in my life at the time, transporting me so thoroughly that, for a moment, I feel like I’m there once again.