Faster, Pussycat! Read! Read!

By liberty on January 31, 2009 | Add a Comment

Liberty, at age 3, crushed by "Disney's Big Book of Villains."Today is the best day of my life. I have this lovely, snowy day off and I'm spending it curled up in a chair with my cat and a book, drinking hot chocolate. I have started reading "The Magus," the 1962 classic by John Fowles, and it really is incredible, simply wonderful. Not like some classics, which you read and then think, "That was dull. Why exactly is it a classic?" "The Magus" is so delicious, I may eat it.

Before today, yesterday was the best day of my life. And before that, the day before yesterday held the position. And so on and so forth, all the way back to the day I learned to read. Teaching me to read at the age of three was my mother's greatest accomplishment. It was the most wonderful gift I've been given, and the most beneficial, one I have used every day since I received it. (Not to be outdone, my father taught me to cross one eye at a time, which, too, has its merits.)

All my favorite memories involve books. My seven-year-old self sitting under the table at the library where my mother worked, flipping through a "Choose Your Own Adventure" while the older boys played Dungeons and Dragons above me. Reading "Gone with the Wind" while home sick from school with the flu. Reading "The Plague Dogs" while home from school, pretending to be sick. Discovering my first Vonnegut, my mind blown wide open.

My whole life has been steeped in books. At all times, if I'm not sleeping or reading, there is still a book at arm's length from me, just in case I should have a spare moment. The bookcases in my apartment occasionally buckle under the weight of my collections; the floor space in my little home is crowded with precariously stacked, shoulder-high piles of books waiting to be read. (My cat gleefully knocks them over on a daily basis - I think she's jealous that she has no thumbs with which to turn the pages.)

Books. Reading. This is, to me, what is best in life.  The cozy, pancakes-for-dinner, feeling of tucking into a new book. The dizzy exhilaration of trying to decide what to read next. The giddiness of being in a bookstore, all those undiscovered sentences waiting to swim in your brain like little inky fish. These are the things that give my life purpose.

"Read in order to live," Gustave Flaubert once wrote. And it is to him, on this, the best day of my life, that I lift my hot chocolate and propose a toast: To everyone out there who feeds on the force that reading breathes into us, whose lives are changed for the better by our little spiny friends, books. May each day you take part in reading be the best you've ever had.