Dining with Squirrels

I say this with all due respect to the humans who love and support me.  Books are among my dearest friends.  I love, love, love reading .  Reading is the pleasure that has sustained me since childhood, the gift that saw me through years with young children when my radio sat silent and the cd player gathered dust.  Such a lot of dust.  Reading has survived where no other avocation could.  I used to love to cook, but the endless catering of family meals met with ennui has deprived me of pleasure in meal-making.   My favorite cartoon from the New Yorker last year:

I’m really a book addict if you must know.  I take a book to bed with me at night and pick it up as I rise in the morning.  I carry books with me in my purse just in case.  I suffered through one horrific morning this fall when my car was unexpectedly deprived of a tire and I didn’t have a book.  I studied a wall map of Grand Rapids in that hell-hole of a garage until I could have taken a second job as a taxi driver.  When I’ve finished a book and haven’t yet picked up another, I feel adrift.  Books anchor me.

I’m not sure why I’m even trying to express it because Nora Ephron said it best in her fanstinkintabulous book of essays I Feel Bad About My Neck.  I could just read the title over and over, it pleases me so.  But here is what she wrote about reading:

“Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter.  Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss.”

So you may have noticed the sidebar on this blog-thingie.  I’m not posting my reading for you, although I’m glad to share.  I’m posting it for me as a sort of diary.  My human friends know that my memory is a frail and unreliable thing, and I hate to think of all the books that have spent a day or two with me only to be lost to the swiss cheese of my brain. I’m going to post all of them and suffer your disdain when you realize I am not a discerning reader.  Voracious, yes.  Discerning, no.  I made a decision after college that I would read whatever I wanted and only what I wanted. It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever done for me.  Nora’s right:  reading IS bliss.