This wonderful, too-short book (actually extended essay) is Quindlen's love letter to reading and although it might sound as preaching to the converted, it speaks to all of us who were born with passion for reading. It is still a mystery to me why some people took to reading from the earliest age while others just couldn't be bothered (something I noticed from the childhood in my own family) so its a revelation to read authoress as eloquent and compassionate as Quindlen who understands this inner urge to travel far away from boring reality trough the wonderful medium of books. Although Quindlen points at certain expectations in American society, where outdoorsy activities were always preferred to suspicious reading indoors, I have absolutely same experiences in my corner of the world, where I was perceived as a strange, bookish child who should "go outside" like my little book companions were somehow not the real world - well, for me they were real world and it still are far more real than anything else. Amongst other things, Quindlen discusses the importance of "bad literature" (all those bestsellers that gave us pleasure back in the day) as opposite to classics often forced upon schoolchildren who are too young to actually enjoy them, the books our parents considered "dirty" and the effects of technology on medium that was long confined to the paper but now metamorphoses - and still thrives - in other clothes. It took me forever to accept e-reader but it didn't diminish my pleasure in reading, in fact thanks to it I am actually reading more than ever before. I gulped this in one sitting and feel such comradeship with Quindlen (and all the bookworms around the world) that I could embrace her with happy smile.
"Yet there was always in me, even when I was very small, the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. And wander I did, although, in my everyday life, I had nowhere to go and no imaginable reason on earth why I should want to leave."
"Perhaps only a truly discontented child can become as seduced by books as I was."
"And a book provides what it always has: a haven. I remember the first year after my second child was born, what I can remember of it at all, as a year of disarray, of overturned glasses of milk, of toys on the floor, of hours from sunrise to sunset that were horribly busy but filled with what, at the end of the day, seemed like absolutely nothing at all. What saved my sanity were books. What saved my sanity was disappearing, if only for the fifteen minutes before I inevitably began to nod off in bed, into the dark and placid English rooms of Anita Brookner’s newest novel, into the convoluted plots of Elmore Leonard’s latest thriller, into one of my old favorites, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Goodbye, Columbus, Our Mutual Friend, Wuthering Heights."
“In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. More powerfully and persuasively than from the ‘shalt nots’ of the Ten Commandments. I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. One of my favorite childhood books, A Wrinkle in Time, described that evil, that wrong, existing in a different dimension from our own. But I felt that I, too, existed much of the time in a different dimension from everyone else I knew. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.”
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