Day 13: Reading Is FUNdamental

Today’s task is a pretty simple one for me since I do it just about every night: Read before bed. Something for fun and something for growth.

As most of you know, I read for a living. So in a way reading probably isn’t a challenge in the true sense of the word – although people have expressed amazement that I can still read for fun after having read for work for eight hours. Still, it is something that always has the power to relax me at the end of the day.

Reading was my first addiction. I can remember the excitement I felt in grammar school when the book order form came home every month. It was nearly impossible to decide which ones I wanted, so I just ordered all of them! I vividly recall walking home from school with a pile of books as high as my head, then choosing one and curling up in the corner of the living room sofa while my mother cooked dinner in the kitchen. This is one of my fondest childhood memories.

I also remember the Library on Wheels – a mobile library bus that used to come to our neighborhood every Monday afternoon in the days before we had a library building in our section of Brooklyn. I loved the smell of library-bound books and the sight of rows and rows of them just waiting for me to discover their contents! And I recall how offended I was that certain sections were off-limits because I was too young to read the books they contained. How dare they!

My childhood can be defined by the books that sparked my imagination: Harriet the Spy, A Wrinkle in Time, The Wizard of Oz and the Nancy Drew series. There were the coming-of-age books of adolescence, the books we giggled over in high school (anyone else remember page 27 of The Godfather?), and those God-awful romances that I read on the bus (who can forget that paragon of literary excellence, Sweet Savage Love?). And of course the two books I read in college by Ayn Rand that molded my worldview: The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

As I entered the “real world,” books helped me navigate the emotional turmoil of relationships, the confusion of being a new parent, the devastation of bereavement and the hopefulness of starting new personal journeys. Even today there’s something fundamentally gratifying about visiting a book fair, a library or a bookstore and coming out with an armload of new adventures, new worlds to explore within the pages of books. I doubt that I will ever own a Kindle or download books to read on my iPhone. For me, the smell and the texture and the promise of a book simply can’t be equaled by an electronic replica.

So tonight, as always, I will end my day with an inspirational reading from one of my meditation books and a polar opposite reading from my latest true-crime selection. And feed my head.