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

by Anne Bogel

To hand you a great book, I don’t just need to know about books; I need to know you.

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.

if my real life reminds me of something I read in a book, I’m reading well—and I’m probably living well, too.

“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.

Just as I’m all the ages I have been, I’m all the readers I have been.

As Italo Calvino wrote, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”

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. The book itself highlights the gap between who I am and who I used to be. I imagine this is why readers frequently revisit their childhood favorites: they take us back to who we were then, reminding us of times long gone by. Rereading helps us see how we have changed.

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.

We are readers. Books grace our shelves and fill our homes with beauty; they dwell in our minds and occupy our thoughts. Books prompt us to spend pleasant hours alone and connect us with fellow readers. They invite us to escape into their pages for an afternoon, and they inspire us to reimagine our lives. Good reading journals provide glimpses of how we’ve spent our days, and they tell the story of our lives.