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

by Anne Bogel

They’re an English Lit major who did all the required reading—and hated a healthy percentage of it. They think Moby-Dick is trash. Also, The Sound and the Fury. And everything by James Joyce.

They own forty-two cozy mysteries, whose covers all feature a skein of yarn, a pie, or both.

The last time they finished a great story, the book hangover lasted three days.

They locked themselves in the bathroom so they could read undisturbed.

C. S. Lewis once wrote, “Friendship . . . is born at the moment when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought I was the only one.’”

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.

You’re in the middle of a great book, and you forget to eat dinner. You keep reading “just one more chapter” until 2:00 a.m., and you cannot keep your eyes open the next day.

After much anticipation, your favorite author’s long-awaited new title finally comes out. It’s terrible.

You have more books than shoes.

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 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 Gold, Chris Cleave thanks his book’s art director and designer, saying, “If you first picked up this book because it looked good, I owe them one.”

Laura Vanderkam, now a mother of four, jokes in I Know How She Does It, “Someday I won’t be asking editors to set deadlines around my due dates.”

Fredrik Backman closes Beartown with a final word to his children: “Thank you for waiting while I wrote this. NOW we can play Minecraft.”

In The Last Ballad, Wiley Cash thanks “the librarians and booksellers who sustain the creative, intellectual, and civic life of our nation.”

In Peace Like a River, Leif Enger thanks his mother, “who read us Robert Louis Stevenson before we could talk, and who writes better letters than anyone since the Apostle Paul.”

Charles Duhigg thanks his parents, who “encouraged me from a young age to write, even as I was setting things on fire and giving them reason to figure that future correspondence might be on prison stationery.”

Book lovers have strong feelings about bookish scents; some of us get poetic about the distinctive smell of freshly inked paper, or old cloth-covered hardcovers, or a used bookstore.

I believe in reading at whim, and I generally choose books that I’m in the mood for, trusting that my reading life will balance out in the end, that I’ll rack up a nice variety of books read without too much conscious effort.

Record your books as a gift to your future self, a travelogue you’ll be able to pull off the shelf years from now, to remember the journey.