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

by Anne Bogel

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.”