Anyone who has ever talked to me for more than about five minutes knows I love to read. What most people don't know is exactly how much I do it. Of course it varies depending on various factors: how much I'm working, whether I've got a project I'm working on, if my books are accessible or not (I once spent three months sleeping on a makeshift bed constructed of an air mattress and eight boxes of books; true story), all kinds of things. But at the least, I usually do two or three books a week, plus a magazine or two. I have been known, at times, to read a book a day.
And frankly, it's not really a hobby that's easy to explain to people. When I moved to Utah, my sister who lived there already found my first apartment, and she was baffled by my need to bring hundreds of books with me. I couldn't find the words to make her understand why the books go where I go.
So now, several years later, I'm living with my parents in what was supposed to be a temporary stint (and is at two years and counting.) My library is in storage at my sister's house, and I have tried various ways of filling the hole in my life. One of these is, obviously, to acquire more books, and since I work in a bookstore and have access to advanced reader copies, stripped paperbacks and a serious discount, I have certainly done my share of that. (It should also be noted here that my sister, the same one who didn't understand the need to haul several hundred books from place to place, aids and abets my addiction by giving me things like about seventy-five Sweet Valley High books she found at a garage sale. I have plans to track down the other forty-odd titles so I have a complete set. As you do).
Anyway, in January I was given a new way to cope with my deprivation when my store won a contest and every employee was given a Nook Tablet. I had never thought of purchasing one for myself, largely because I couldn't afford it, but it was nice to have. And since then I have used it in various degrees of frequency. I subscribed to a few magazines, bought (or got for free) about fifty ebooks, loaded up a bunch of music and dozens of pictures of my nieces and nephew, and added some games for them. It's a handy toy and I have affectionately named it Arthur.
Last week I was packing for a four-day family reunion in Island Park, which is across the state. Normally for a trip of that duration, I would have packed...five or six books, just to make sure. But we (my mom, my younger sister and I) were making the trip in my mother's Mustang, which meant that space was at a premium. So I brought my Nook along. And it turned out to be very useful-I listened to music, read a few magazines and played games with my niece and nephew, who are endlessly entertained by the thing. What I didn't do was much serious reading because there just wasn't time; we rented an enormous house with pool and Ping Pong tables, visited Yellowstone (including seeing Old Faithful, which was a first for me) and stayed up way later than we should have playing board games. It was a great weekend.
But in the way that all vacations are, it was exhausting, and I looked forward to nothing more than getting home and getting some much-delayed rest. Unfortunately, that was delayed by my mother's car deciding that ten miles out of Burley was an ideal location to develop an almost-flat tire and then refuse to start up again. An hour and a half of standing on a freeway in July. followed by the final two-and-a-half hours travel, and I arrived home Sunday evening tired, hot, sweaty and crumpled. And all I wanted was to go to sleep. Since my body doesn't really seem to like sleeping unless the conditions are absolutely perfect, and I couldn't find my Nook charging cable to finish the magazine I'd been reading, I opted instead to flop down on my bed and read the first book I saw, called The Meryl Streep Movie Club, an ARC I had picked up at work a while back and hadn't gotten to yet.
About two hours later, I emerged from it with a realization: I felt better. Not hot, not cranky, not filled up with thought of my vacation or going back to work or what I should get done the next day. I also discovered that, fond as I am of Arthur Nook, it isn't possible for me to have that same level of immersion in an electronic device. Reading books is an escape, a way to take myself out of my life and dive into someone else's, to come away with renewed perspective and appreciation for all my blessings, to learn things I didn't know before and get additional information about things I did.
And that, I think, is why I love to read. Because by taking a vacation from myself, I come to know that self much better. And every book I read, good or bad, enjoyable or not, changes me a little. So it is in this lifelong love affair with the written word that I have become who I am, and by disengaging from the world and from my own head, even for a short while, that I figure out who that is.
