Riches from the Library

Books, Librarians 0

Books permitted me to embark on dangerous voyages to a world of painted faces of mandrills and leopards scanning the vbeldt from the high branches of a baobab tree. There was nothing my mother could not bring me from a library. When I met a young marine in the woods one day hunting butterflies with a net and a killing jar, my mother checked out a book that took me far into the world of lepidoptera, with hairstreaks, sulphurs, and fritillaries placed in solemn rows.

Whatever prize I brought out of the woods, my mother could match with a book from the library She read so many books that she was famous among the librarians in every town she entered. Since she did not attend college, she looked to librarians as her magic carpet into a serious intellectual life. Books contained powerful amulets that could lead to paths of certain wisdom. Novels taught her everything she needed to know about the mysteries and uncertainties of being human.

— Pat Conroy, My Reading Life, p. 4-5

Books as Basic Self-Care

Books, Reading 0

I am here to posit that it’s exactly in these moments of struggle and stress that we need books the most. There’s something in the pause to read that’s soothing in and of itself. A moment with a book is basic self-care, the kind of skill you pass along to your children as you would a security blanket or a churchgoing habit. It’s a pair of glasses you let sit on your nose for a few stolen hours, coloring your familiar living room and the blustery world outside with the lens of another woman’s experience. It’s a familiar book, rediscovered and dusted off, cracked open at random until you’re sucked in again. It reads differently at different junctures in your life, but that’s part of the fun. Time travel, redemption, escape, and self-knowledge are all neatly bound and sewn into the modest covers of the books we pass from hand to hand, library to purse, mother to daughter, where heroines’ lessons live long after they’ve gone out of print or disintegrated from love and wear.

— Erin Blakemore, The Heroine’s Bookshelf: Life Lessons from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder, p. xv

Why Kids Read

Books, Children, Children and Books, Reading 0

Why do kids read? They read because they are made to, of course, but they also read — via media in a multitude of forms — because they want to find something out, or they want to join their imagination with somebody else’s. I will say it again: They read for the same reasons adults do.

— Roger Sutton, A Family of Readers, p. xviii

Reading Great Books With Our Children

Books, Children, Children and Books, Reading 0

When we read great books with our children, we teach them to turn to great books throughout their lives for comfort, humor, and for illumination of the human experience. The most influential leaders and thinkers in the world have consistently relied on literature for inspiration at their most difficult moments. Nelson Mandela turned to Steinbeck during his imprisonment and says it changed his life. Lincoln was criticized for reading novels in the middle of the Civil War; he defended himself by saying that it kept him sane.

Whether we are called upon to govern a nation or organize a birthday party for too many children, the key to both surviving our days and cultivating our next generation of leaders is many books, well chosen.

— Kyle Zimmer, Everything I Learned to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book, edited by Anita Silvey, p. 207

Empowered Readers

Books, Children and Books, Reading 0

I am convinced more than ever that once the great global climactic catastrophe has destroyed the earth, when the stragglers dig themselves out from their damp bomb-shelter hovels and go hard-core low-tech, readers of young adult fiction will make up the core of the new society . . . because we are the only ones who will find living off the land fun.

— Lizzie Skurnick, Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading, p. 218

Living More Fully

Books, Life 0

The point of reading is not reading but living. Reading helps you live with greater appreciation, keener insight and heightened emotional awareness. For proof, look to the innumerable great readers who have been great doers, from John Adams to Teddy Roosevelt to Paul Theroux to George Plimpton. Reading and action reinforce each other in an ever-escalating manner.

Your well-read life is a path for living more fully.

— Steve Leveen, The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, p. 31

Changed by Reading

Books, Growth, Inspiration, Joy 0

A book on virtually any subject, when written well and falling into the right hands, can produce a transcendent emotional response. And one such experience can lead to another and another, in a delightfully unpredictable way that is different for each person.

It is said that no love is sincerer than the love of food. Perhaps no love is vaster in its particulars than the love of books.

As adults, we can use the power of book love not only to entertain us, but also to inspire us to do new things, and to make significant changes in our lives. We can even use our love of books to help others, and maybe save a bit of the world.

That’s what reading is all about — the pure pleasure of it, how it changes you, how you live your life differently because of what you read.

— Steve Leveen, The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, p. 8

Book Love

Books, Joy, Love 0

Book love is something like romantic love. When we are reading a really great book, burdens feel lighter, cares seem smaller, and commonplaces are suddenly delightful. You become your best optimistic self. Like romantic love, book love fills you with a certain warmth and completeness. The world holds promise. The atmosphere is clearer and brighter; a beckoning wind blows your hair.

But while romantic love can be fleeting, book love can last. Readers in book love become more skilled at choosing books that thrill them, move them, transport them. Success breeds success, as these lucky people learn how to find diamonds over and over. They are always reading a good book. They are curious, interested — and usually interesting — people. That keen observer of reading, Holbrook Jackson, wrote in 1931, “Book-love…never flags or fails, but, like Beauty itself, is a joy for ever.”

— Steve Leveen, The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, p. 7