“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” Carl Sagan
I absolutely love reading. That's a statement that 3rd, 7th, or even 10th grade versions of myself would have never guessed I would utter...but it took me a while to understand the why and the what. To me, reading is a cheat code. It's something that separates us from other animals. No other species can leverage the experience of someone else from another time or current time but in another location but us. We have books so we don't need to just rely on local information, or history passed down to us from generation to generation. Books allow us to understand exactly how something went, or exactly what someone else was thinking, how they lived their lives, how they handled situations. It's pure. Whether it's explicit or told through characters, George R.R. Martin said "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, the man who never reads lives only one" and I firmly believe that to be true.
I don't like to keep track of the number of books I read a year, but it was normally between 20-30 before the birth of my daughter and since has been less. In 2017 I set a goal for myself to read 52 books. I accomplished this, but the last quarter of the year, I retained very little and found my focus instead to be on getting to the back cover, putting it on the shelf and grabbing a new one. I'll never do that again. I don't blame people for setting goals like that in order to keep themselves motivated, but I also have to understand that I'm a very competitive person and therefore goals like that can be a hindrance, not an enhancement.
My bookshelf is not the most exciting bookshelf you'll ever see. There are very few Hollywood blockbusters that will ever be written about the books I read or what to read but I'm okay with that. I prefer to read non-fiction and watch and/or listen to fiction. Furthermore, a bit unoriginal but I prefer to touch, hold, feel, and smell a physical book vs. a kindle or even worse, an iPhone(or iPad). I buy all my books used unless it's an author I really really want to support or a new release where there just isn't the ability to buy used. The same way that I love the concept of books because you're getting a peek into someone, I also love holding a book that I know multiple people have gotten an experience from. The oldest book on my shelf is from 1952, "The Big Change" by Frederick Lewis Allen. It showed up and the pages were yellow, it had a smell. The back cover has some drawings on the inside and the binding feels like it's barely holding on. Even before you read the text, the book has a story.
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