How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

I am a reader. I am intelligent. I have something worthy to contribute.

Harriet was forever showing us how to read. How to look for shapes and layers. How to see that stories have a “meanwhile”—an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along.

“Books won’t solve my problems, Harriet.” “No, but they give your problems perspective. They allow your problems to breathe.”

“Perhaps it’s an oddity of human nature to judge women more harshly. Or maybe we expect so little of men, their transgressions don’t register the same.”

We are a continuum of human experience, neither the worst nor the best thing we have ever done. Or, more exactly, we are both the best thing and the worst thing we’ve ever done. We are all of it, all at once, all the time.

“Apologies require acceptance, so I thank you,” he says, nudging the bookends back into my lap. “But as I understand it, forgiveness flows in one direction only.”

game, inhaling him, my mind reeling backward, a sensory

“I am a reader. I am intelligent. I have something worthy to contribute.”

Retired people were often thought to be lonely, but it wasn’t that. It was the feeling of uselessness, of being done with it all.

“The writer writes the words. The given reader reads the words. And the book, the unique and unrepeatable book, doesn’t exist until the given reader meets the writer on the page.”

“Because life is the same as books, Misha. There’s a story and a meanwhile, and we get to say which is which.”