For the love of books

I’ll probably head to the bookstore after work today and visit a book. One of my favorite authors just released her third novel and I’m dying to get my hands on it. I’ll find it on the shelf, pick it up and run my fingers across the spine and the front cover with that special love as if it’s my own personal work. I will crack the book open ever so carefully and read the synopsis and peep at the opening lines before snapping it shut, not wanting to spoil the experience of diving into the story until after I have exited the store with the receipt tucked in the pages. I’ve done this since I was a small child in San Francisco roaming the shelves of the beloved Borders bookstores. I would admire a particular special book and when Christmas or my birthday came around and I was asked to compile a list of wishes, I would venture, so there’s this book… I visited dream books as you might have visited grandparents. 

My book collection is a source of incredible joy and pride. I added a second bookshelf to my room the other night, allowing my stacks to breathe, arranged in alphabetical order by authors. Now there’s space for the collection to grow. Through books I have been able to travel in both time and space and marvel at what is possible for a human being to conjure up, to feel and experience. In times of intense loneliness and heartache, I have leaned on characters that have felt much of the same feelings. I underwent a year of multiple deaths in the family, the complexities of grief and that gaping hole in your heart that doesn’t close up which was articulated with such incredible empathy and insight in a number of books I devoured. I escaped in silliness and dreamy romances but mostly, the fire of belief in my ability to write my own stories was ignited. It’s not a wish but a need to write it out. Maybe one day another small child will come and pick up my work off the shelf and run her fingers across it and add it to her wish list and it will help her to dream on.