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

by Anne Bogel

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.