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

by Anne Bogel

If I could read only great books for the rest of my days, I would be happy.

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. When I think of the characters and stories and ideas contained on a single shelf of my personal library, it boggles my mind. To readers, those books—the ones we buy and borrow and trade and sell—are more than objects. They are opportunities beckoning us. When we read, we connect with them (or don’t) in a personal way.

reading is personal. We can’t know what a book will mean to us until we read it. And so we take a leap and choose.

How good it is to be among people who are reading.

I’ve been fortunate to receive quite a few of these magical gifts. Not in the form of breakfast treats, or coins, or clothing, but time after time I’ve been given a strange, unexpected, and completely perfect gift: a book. Not any book, but the right book, right when I needed it.

I don’t carefully plan—and yet it’s uncanny how often I seem to be reading just the right book at just the right time. Sometimes I feel compelled to read a book—or someone feels compelled to recommend it—for reasons I can’t discern, and only later do I find it’s essential to me, right then. Not before I started reading it, but after. The book may seem random when I choose it, but halfway through I realize, I need this right now. Call it chance, or fate, or divine providence. Blame it on probabilities or my own state of mind—when the student is ready, the teacher appears, etcetera. Credit it to dumb luck. I just know it’s served me well to pay attention to subtle hints, and that includes hints about books.

If this has happened to you—if the right book has almost magically appeared in your life at the right time to hold your hand for the journey—you know it feels like a special kind of grace.

Sometimes, of course, I seek out a book I need. But sometimes it’s more apt to say the book seeks me. I’ve learned books move in mysterious ways, and I’d do well to pay attention.

As a devoted reader, I lovingly give countless hours to finding the right books for me. I don’t think those hours are wasted; part of the fun of reading is planning the reading. But I’ve learned that sometimes, despite my best efforts, a book unexpectedly finds me and not the other way around. And when it does, it’s okay to reshuffle my To Be Read list and go with it.

The best books move you, drawing out the full range of emotions from the reader, and sometimes that includes breaking your heart.

Sometimes a book prods you to grieve with its characters. You’re immersed in the story, so much so that you feel what they’re feeling. When a beloved character experiences loss—of someone they love, of a friendship, of their innocence—you feel their pain. When he grieves, you grieve with him. Sometimes you grieve the characters themselves: they die, you feel like you’ve lost a friend, and you weep. Sometimes a book brings the tears because you don’t want it to end. You’ve been on a journey together, you and your fictional friends, and you don’t want to close that literal chapter of your life and move on. When my daughter read Holly Goldberg Sloan’s novel Short, she cried so hard she scared me a little. The novel is about an unlikely band of people who experience something exceptional together, and when their time together ends, the book ends too. When I asked if they were happy tears or sad tears, she told me through sobs that they were good tears: she was just so sorry it was over. 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.

Madeleine L’Engle is Madeleine to me, because I feel like we understand each other. I refer to these authors personally and often, and putting them on the friends and family shelf seems fair, even if the authors themselves don’t know I exist.

Envy is a deadly sin, but bookshelf envy has proven to be a source of inspiration.

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.

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. 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 environments, to test-drive encounters with new people and new experiences. Through our reading, we learn how to 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.

I didn’t want my life to imitate art; I wanted what I read to remind me of something I had already experienced.

Our books frame the scenes for us so we can better understand and experience what’s happening when it happens to us

if 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.”

Should is a dangerous word, a warning sign that we’re crossing an important boundary and veering into book bossiness. Should is tangled up with guilt, frustration, and regret; we use it all the time, many of us to speak of the ways we wish we could be more, do more, or just be different. Or that we wish our friends could be different, and they would if they knew what was good for them. Should is bossy.

Readers want to discover what they want to read, and they want to discover it for themselves.

You pile the stack in your passenger seat, and your car yells at you because it thinks you have an unbuckled passenger.

XD Literally happens to me at least once a week

Your To Be Read list holds 8,972 titles, and you want to read every one. Your TBR list is unquestionably too long to finish before you die. Your TBR list is longer than your arm, but you still can’t decide what to read next. You have countless unread books at home, yet you feel like you have nothing to read. You have countless unread books at home, but the only book you’re in the mood to read won’t be published for six more weeks. You have countless unread books at home, but you can’t resist buying one more.

You have more books than shoes. You have more books than bookshelves. You do some quick math and realize how much money is tied up in your book collection. You suspect your books equal the gross domestic product of a small nation. You accept that it’s time to cull your personal library. You lovingly handle each book, determining if it brings you joy. It does. They all do. You are full of bookish joy, but still woefully short on shelf space.

without consciously intending to, the ideas I got from books formed the interior architecture of my mind.

I can’t name every title or author whose words are bricks in my mental house; their words snuck in too long ago or under the radar of my consciousness. But some authors occupy such an outsized place in my mind—their words have been so formative—that I can almost point to the specific bricks their works put in place. One of these is Madeleine L’Engle, who first won me over when I was a kid meeting A Wrinkle in Time, and later when I was a young mother. I began reading her memoirs at the urging of a friend, and when I encountered her phrase “the tired thirties” to describe the decade between thirty and forty, during which she would often literally fall asleep with her head against the typewriter, I knew she could be trusted. L’Engle knew a thing or two about the stages of a woman’s life, and she wrote frequently about the process of growing up and growing older. 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.

As a devoted reader, I know what it means for books to shape you—the person you are, the person you were then. 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.

I often tell myself I’ll get around to reading a certain book one day. But good intentions are worth only so much, and sometimes one day never comes.

history hides in curious places.”

In Empire Falls (perhaps my favorite acknowledgments ever), Richard Russo thanks his editor, saying, “I’d attempt to describe my gratitude in words, but then he’d have to edit them, and he’s worked too hard already.”

In their acknowledgments, authors shower praise on the oft-unsung behind-the-scenes crew. In The Wife, the Maid, and the Mistress, Ariel Lawhon credits her copy editor with “the patience of Job and the thoroughness of the IRS.” In Small Victories, Anne Lamott thanks her longtime copy editor, saying, “You have saved me from looking illiterate more times than I can count.”

I’m a reader who always wondered what the writing life was like, and not knowing the details, supplied my own—imagining writers cozied in garret apartments with old-fashioned typewriters and endless cups of tea. But in the acknowledgments, the authors hint at the practicalities of writing books, brass-tacks details that might otherwise never occur to readers. They may casually mention that they were three years behind on their deadline, or that they never could have met that deadline without the assistance of the freezer section at Trader Joe’s. Or that their local Apple Store employee saved their presumed lost manuscript in their hour of need, or that their child’s technological troubleshooting was invaluable.

early reading shapes the reader you become.

Every reader goes through this rite of passage: the transition from having books chosen for us to choosing books for ourselves. When given the choice, some choose not to read. But you, dear reader, moved from being told what to read to choosing for yourself.

We make a reading life by reading, and we stumble as we figure it out, learning through trial and error not just what to read for ourselves, but how.

Book lovers have strong feelings about bookish scents;

In my imagination my bookstore is a friendly yet irresistible destination, a temple to the written word, a community hub, a spot where readers gather around the common love of reading, discuss lofty literary and quotidian concerns, always find the books they’re looking for—and the toilets clean themselves.

the booksellers aren’t sitting behind the counter losing themselves in good books. They’re focused on the hundreds of small tasks it takes to get the right book into your hands.

A book twin is a joy,

Bookish enthusiasm is contagious, but it isn’t sufficient—not if I want to find the books that are truly right for me,

a good book not only holds up to repeated visits, but improves each time we return to it.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

a good book is exciting to return to, because even though I’ve been there before, the landscape is always changing.

“A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

Rereading can make you remember who you used to be, and, like pencil marks on a door frame, show you how much you’ve changed.

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.