Why

If I've been a book addict almost as long as I can remember, why start trying to analyze it now?  A few things happened to me this weekend that made me look at my adoration of books in new ways, and I'm still trying to process all of the ramifications.  It's always been easier for me to process in writing, otherwise my mind gets stuck wandering in circles.  Thus, the blog.


Okay, so now for what happened.  You know how you can travel along in life with nothing eventful, life-changing, or even thought-provoking happening for a long, long while and then out of nowhere planets align, stars converge, and things happen?  Things that may not even have made an impact at another time, or paired with different events, but that when they happen in the way and at the time that they do, they all but FORCE you to stop and think and breathe and analyze.  Yeah, that was my weekend.


First,  I've been reading the hilarious and amazing Jennifer Armintrout's blog for a while now, and on Friday she posted about when she learned to read and how amazing that felt.  She ended with this paragraph:

"I will never forget how awesome that feeling was.  I could read.  It was all going to be downhill from there, because I could read.  In the end, maybe that's what we're all looking for when we pick up a book.  Reading is like a drug addiction, we're always chasing that greater high, trying to find a book that makes us feel as awesome as our favorites did.  And I think that feeling is probably inspired by how we felt the very first time we realized that we had become readers."

That was IT!  I had known for years that I was a book addict, but I had never thought that the reason was that I was trying to re-create that feeling I had when I first learned to read.  That connection staggered me, and for the first time in my reclusive and antisocial history, I left a comment on someone's blog.


See, I also remember the moment I realized I could read.  I have an astoundingly few memories of my childhood, to the point where I often wonder if my subconscious has taken an active role in deleting some of them.  But this one I've managed to hold on to.  I can still remember what the book looked like.  (Sadly, it's a series that my mom chose to purge long before I told her how much I'd have liked to keep them, so I now no longer even have any idea of the name.) I almost remember what the pictures looked like.  But what I remember most of all is that all of a sudden those little marks below the pictures suddenly seemed to swim into focus, and suddenly I WAS READING!  


I also remember feeling like the whole world was open to me now, and that feeling has never left.  I can go anywhere in a book: anywhere on earth or any number of other worlds, back or forward in time, anywhere someone's imagination could go, I could now join them.  It's so hard to find words for that feeling:  awe and excitement and humility and freedom and POWER and gratitude and wonder.


Looking at it that way, is it any wonder that I've spent my life looking to re-experience that feeling?


The second thing that happened this weekend is that I GOT THERE! Or as close as I've come in years.  On Thursday, one of my Goodreads friends posted reviews of the last two books in Jordan Castillo Price's Channeling Morpheus/Sweet Oblivion series.  I read the blurb for the first book and decided I HAD to try this out.  I bought the first, Payback, on Thursday night just to be sure I'd love it as much as I expected I would before buying the whole series (yes, working from experience there... /sigh).  As I expected (and hoped) I LOVED it and I bought the other nine books first thing Friday morning.


I then proceeded to spend nearly all of Friday and all of Saturday completely lost (immersed, absorbed,... whatever adjective means I lost track of reality completely) in the crazy, amazing, fucked-up, and beautiful relationship of Michael and Wild Bill.  My god, what a ride that was!  The last book, Elixir, is honestly one of the most breathtakingly romantic books of all time.  I'm still reeling from it, to the point that I haven't been able to even gather my thoughts enough to write a coherent review of it.  But that book, at the end of that series, is EXACTLY why I have spent my life reading.


Books let us see and feel and experience things that we don't often get to in real life.  Or, if we do, it's in a much more diluted state than we can get in books.  I got to read about months (years?) in the lives of these two characters, and watch them grow from the jaded, cynical, untrusting, emotionally closed-off, terrified people they were at the start into the (with each other) open, trusting, selfless, compassionate people they became in that last book.  All in the space of 48 hours.


That is beautiful, and powerful, and awe-inspiring and humbling.  THAT is why I read.