How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

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

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.

Harriet recalled his age as sixty-eight, not terribly old, not these days.

She sat in her car, taking one sip of air after another, rocked by grief, feeling old and irrelevant. 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.

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