From Seven to Seventeen: My Journey as a Book Lover
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”
Why do I read? It’s a question that’s been asked by my friends for years. What’s the point of staring down at hundreds of pages with oodles of words on it, staring at the reader, stark against the crisp white pages?
I could say it’s a habit — growing up, my bookshelves were better stocked than the kitchen pantry. It held everything from Frances Hodgson Burnett to JK Rowling to Laura Ingles Wilder, taking me from the murky days in foggy London, to the endless rolling hills and prairies in Kansas.
As a child, I was holed up in an apartment, gazing down at the dull desert below me. As a reader, I was transported to a new place with every page turned. My parents were my ship and their lilting voices the waves. They carried me gently to each place we visited at night between the lines of the latest paperback we bought.
Growing up, I wanted to be Sara Crewe. I would write stories like her, cried when she was stuck in that attic, felt her desperate hunger for food, comfort, and education. My imagination ran rampant as a child. These characters weren’t just two dimensional words written by an author. They were my friends and my inspiration. I was seven in a desert country in the Middle East, but by just ten, I had witnessed the ups and downs of life through the likes of Anne Shirley, Harry Potter, and Lucy Peverell.
At 17, my phone lies two feet away from me, yet the screen is blank. A book lies on my lap, the open pages home to all the secrets and beauty the author has left behind like a love letter to my subdued imagination. The clock ticks closer to the witching hour. Rapidly cooling tea is all but forgotten next to me on a raggedy coaster as my eyes flick back and forth over the page, drinking in the glamorous descriptions of the Netherfield Ball.
Whether as a seven or seventeen year old, the comforting weight of a book in my hand, guarantees the fall down the rabbit hole of another reality, all while melting away the stress that has accumulated through the day. Now, instead of the innocent caravan through the rolling hills of Wisconsin, my bedroom transforms into Tolstoy’s luxurious ball in Moscow, and the bottled up frustration dissipates in seconds. I’ve gone from hunching over at my desk, slaving away at the report that’s due in a week’s time, to dressed in pearls and silk at Gatsby’s party entranced by all the secret affairs behind closed doors, or silently sneaking around, part of a dangerous heist.
The worlds illustrated with just words — the oodles of of lines on white paper that have the power to paint pictures more vivid than the high production CGI— create a portal from the dull drudgery that is life, into one where the only limit is one’s own thoughts. It’s an escape from the reality we live in, and into someone else’s reality, where their problems become our insight, our lessons, a new perspective to mull over. The oodles of words on the crisp white paper are still never just two-dimensional. I’m still a teenager, who still has so much more to see of the world, yet I’ve followed ‘A Little Life’ through the emotive writings of Hanya Yanagihara and witnessed Dorian walk into his own demise as a result of his hedonistic philosophies.
Though my parents no longer read to me, the beauty of storytelling is enough to carry me through timelines of history, and countries all over the world and beyond. The magic of opening a book, to me, never fails to provide an escape from wherever I am.
