I start every semester assuming that my students don’t like to read and don’t like to write. I figure it is good to have low expectations, that way they can only go up. Most semesters my students pleasantly surprise me with a smattering of interest in reading and rather average writing. However this semester I’ve seen outright anger at reading. I’ve had students say that reading is for those with nothing better to do with their time. That fiction reading is for those who lack true imagination. Ironically, while I was having these conversations with my students I found myself falling into the love pit with a book (“Twilight” see the review below). And all of this made me think about how I came to love books and why I so passionately love them.

My first true love was with “Alice in Wonderland”. I’m sure I had read other books up to this point but this was the first “grown-up” chapter book I remember reading. I loved Alice. I loved her logical approach to life and yet her willingness to go with the magical things that happened around her. Mainly, I remember the feeling of disappearing from the world. I eagerly jumped down the rabbit hole and I’ve never really returned.

After Alice, came thousands of adventures. I solved murder after murder with Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. I traveled into the future with Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury. I cried with Jane Erye and I fell in love with Elizabeth Bennett. Then a whole parade followed of Walt Whitman, Sylvia Plath, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Dickens, Wordsworth, Petrarch, Steinbeck, etc. I’ve spent endless hours with my nose stuck in a book and not once did I think I was wasting my time. Could I have found a more practical use for my time? Certainly, but never a better use of it.

People talk about drug addicts going on “binges” where they sit in a house somewhere and do drugs for 24-36 hours straight and nobody can find them. Although I have never done drugs that is the closest I can come to describe what it feels like to lose yourself in a book. Your reality disappears around you and the only world you really know is the one in that book. That is true escapism, it is the perfect drug. It is selfish, it is passionate, it is addictive, it is expensive.

When I finish reading a long, tasty, delicious book I emerge in a haze. The book world is somehow inextricably intertwined with mine and I’m left confused. Where does my world end and the other world begin? And like a drug addict it may take me a good 24 hours to “come down from my high”. When I reengage with the world around me I’m instantly looking for the next great book with which to fall in love. I could go on and on about the feeling of the pages in my hand, of the anticipation I feel in my stomach with each new page, the sound and look of the words on the page. It is glorious. It is the mark of a true bibliophile. My books are the security blanket that encircles me. Because for every problem, for every challenge, for every question I can find a book to meet it, to beat it, to make it seem common.

And now for the truth — I teach to support my habit. My book habit. My name is Beth and I’m a bibliophile.