How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

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

Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, a collection of brief life stories spoken by the dead in a fictionalized Illinois graveyard.

The whims of youth moved at the speed of light.

I saw myself as a good machine That Life had never used.

The new store clerk had called the handyman “cute”—a strong, capable adult man! The

Fred’s thoughts exactly

Kristy had her mother’s build and obsession with fitness and otherworldly ability to not hear what hit her ears as unacceptable.

The line between this and that, you and her, us and them, the line is thin.

How he envied this bejeweled bookseller, who brimmed with a brand of self-assurance found mainly in this generation of the young.

Oh, how he missed being a working man. Not just saying it; being it.

she carried so much wherever she went.

“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.”

If you read with pure intention, she believed, then Jesus does not judge.

Is there anything like a lover’s arms? That blanketing gladness? That muffling care? No there is not. It makes you deaf, it makes you blind, it makes you stupid.

Even the least eventful life holds an avalanche of stories. Any one of mine would give you a fair impression of who I was and how I lived. But the one I chose—the one that now composes this epitaph—isn’t a story at all. It’s what Harriet would call the meanwhile, the important thing that was happening while the rest of the story moved along. My name was Violet Powell. I took a life. I lived and died. Meanwhile, I was loved.