Books help keep me alive and for that I am forever happy

As a child, I had a difficult time learning how to read. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read. In fact, I desperately wanted to be able to do what my mother and father did every day with me—make words on the page come out of their mouths in magical sounds. I would stare at those squiggly black lines on the page trying to make them into words, into something, anything I could make sense of. I wanted to make them mine.

And then suddenly, one day, BAM, I was reading! The black lines were words, glorious words. I ate every one of them right up and haven’t looked back since. I now work at a literacy non-profit spreading the love and pleasure of, you guessed it, reading. The most incredible moments in my work are when a young person finds a book that they can truly and deeply connect with. Many of my students consistently say “I don’t like reading”, or “Reading is boring”. So, when I see a young person re-reading a Mo Willems Pigeon book for the hundredth time and begging their staff to read it to them, I know I’ve succeeded, if just a little, in helping children see that reading can be joyous.

Although I’ve known that I love reading, lately I’ve been even more grateful of the space it occupies in my life. I’ve been going through a bit of a rough patch lately—I’ll spare you the particulars, but let’s just say I’ve been feeling like I’m in a boat floating about in a wild sea with no oar, no sails, and no map. And when in a boat like that, it’s challenging to keep sight of what’s positive and hopeful in life. Instead of seeing the blue sky and taking the time to breathe, I can only see the obnoxious fellow riders on the bus and T, the angry pedestrians, and experience a general feeling of malaise. The other day I was at the gym finishing the book Incredibly Close and Extremely Loud by Jonathan Safron Foer. For unknown reasons, I’ve resisted his books up to this point. I don’t know why, because now I’m a HUGE convert. So, I had loved the book up to this point, but the ending: wow. I had the weirdest experience—I’m on the elliptical, sweating my bum off, physically moving my body , and doing my damnedest not to break out in giant sobs as I try to finish the book. I looked out the window at the breathtakingly blue sky and just thought, Oh man, I am so full of feeling and life and look at that sky and I am alive. And I am alive. Books help keep me alive and for that I am forever happy. If I can continue to find bliss in books and to help other people find bliss, I’ll continue to find meaning in this crazy thing we call life.

Sarah Farbo

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Words are my food & I Hope Others Will Join the Feast

The people who ask me what they should read are often the most cat-killing curious of customers, the men and women (and sometimes children) that want, simply put, to be entertained by something new. To this question I respond: “Well, what do you like?” It’s true that everyone has their favorite authors, just as everyone has their literary enemies. Working in a new and used bookstore, where the smell of ancient bindings is always waiting for a covert sniff, I field a lot of ambiguous questions; and you know what? I love it. Words are my food, and I hope others will join in on the feast.

Books can be harsh and silly, they can heal you and hurt you and echo in your mind like cannon-fire. They are redemptive and fun, and can swim raucously around in your intestines like greasy food. Time-tested literature is worth, to me, more than I can express in such a short space. Reading has changed me in the most significant way, as it has given a gift: the realization that I want to be a writer. No longer do I feel the conflict of your average mid-twenties male, puppy-lost in his career search. Now I have a purpose.

I think everyone should read something for pleasure, and it saddens me that there are individuals who do not. How beautiful is this thing called language, the only connection between the author’s vision and the reader’s imagining? As a novelist friend once told me, stories save lives. Books are so much more than just what you hold in your hand. Books are what you hold inside.

Ian Ross

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If you have to hide a book, it must be valuable

THE WHALES, a picture book by Cynthia Rylant full of beautiful illustrations of whales, naturally, was the first book I was driven to hide. Now, I’m as fond of whales as the next person, and I’m fond of picture books. Fondness can dim though, when a two-year-old asks for a whale book to be read not just once or twice a day, but once or twice an hour. We had stacks of picture books in the house. It didn’t matter. They seemed to be invisible, so I admit it, I hid the chosen book for a few hours each day. For a child of two, out of sight was out of mind, and it meant I got a welcome respite to all whales, all the time.

The day did come when my son didn’t want me to read the book more than a few times. Joy reigned. I read him at least ten other picture books I had waiting. Wonderful, colorful, fabulous stories. I was happy. But for those of you with book-obsessed toddlers, I’m sure you can guess what came next. A different book, this one called OUR NEW KITTEN by Harriet Hanes, became the new must-read all the time. We ended up with three copies of that book. After the first was in tatters, from the necessary practice of turning pages to him carrying it around like a talisman to me hiding it in the hamper and under sofa cushions, I bought two more. One, I cut up, putting each page in a protective sleeve, and then punching holes in the cover and rebinding it with string. The other I put away, because if a book is so well-loved, it must not be forgotten.

My son is long past that age, and now carries around books so that he can sneak in a few pages of reading when he has time. I still buy picture books, especially around the holidays. They are supposedly just a quirk of mine, but I find when I’m reading them, others in the family migrate to sit next to me just to keep me company. No whale books though. I might have to resort to hiding them.

Dee Garretson

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Your Answers to the Question: What is a Book Worth?

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post looking at the value of books, mostly because I wanted to talk abut something other than how much books cost. In some ways, it was a very general look at what books do in our world, but in other ways it was a very personal statement, it was me telling you how valuable books are to me. From conversations in the store, to reading blogs, to following all the bookish goodness on Twitter, I know that I am far from alone. Books are valuable to many people for many different reasons. I’d like to share those reasons with the world.

So send me an answer to the question: What is a book worth? You can talk very generally about books and reading in your life. You can share a story about a particular book that was and is important in your life. You can tell a story about giving that perfect gift, getting that perfect gift, or the one book you always seem to lend out, but never seem to get back. There are many different readers, many different books, and many different ways a book can be valuable, and I’d like to hear about all of them.

So please send your response(s) to josh@portersquarebooks.com. You can write something of blog length (1-3 paragraphs), you can include pictures, if you want to make a video you can upload it to youtube and send me the link. What am I going to do with them? I’ll post everything I get on our blog and spread those answers around on Twitter and Facebook. If there’s a quote we think is particularly pithy or powerful we’ll display it somewhere in the store. And then we’ll see what happens. If there’s a big response, we might try to do something else. If not, then we’ll still have a collection of thoughts, reflections, ideas, and stories about books. That alone, seems worthwhile.