The Benefit of Books

Like many others who turned into writers, I disappeared into books when I was very young, disappeared into them like someone running into the woods. What surprised and still surprises me is that there was another side to the forest of stories and the solitude, that I came out that other side and met people there. Writers are solitaries by vocation and necessity. Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone. - Rebecca Solnit

During my childhood, my father read to me at bedtime. I'd snuggle under my comforter as he encouraged me to close my eyes and create mind images of the stories using my ears, sense of smell, and taste. 

When he opened the book, I could smell its wonder.

One evening I must have fallen asleep during his reading of Arabian Nights because I shook when I heard my father's voice say, "The villagers were angry."

Mashed carrots steamed from a bowl on a window ledge. I could smell them. Their cinnamon and clove flavor exploded into my mouth. From then on when I heard the word, angry, it elicited an association with carrots. It became a beneficial trigger to make me laugh and not get caught up in the emotion the word represented. 

I wanted to read the words myself and urged my father to teach me. He began by teaching me about cursive writing. He showed ways to make leads and tails on vowels. Loops needed to soar high and low in consonants.  

I had to repeat the squiggles until they looked like his ideal.

My time arrived to read those books he had read to me and  to search for others. After all the books of fairy tales and Mark Twain's journeys,  Mice on Horseback, by Susan Tweedsmuir led me into more adventures.

Rebecca Solnit wrote an essay for how books saved her life, in the anthology, A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader (public library). The book contains illustrated letters (121) to children about why we read and how books transform us. Written by artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and adventurers whose character has been shaped by a life of reading.

Solnit writes: "Some books are toolkits you take up to fix things, from the most practical to the most mysterious, from your house to your heart, or to make things, from cakes to ships. Some books are wings. Some are horses that run away with you. Some are parties to which you are invited, full of friends who are there even when you have no friends. In some books you meet one remarkable person; in others a whole group or even a culture. Some books are medicine, bitter but clarifying. Some books are puzzles, mazes, tangles, jungles. Some long books are journeys, and at the end you are not the same person you were at the beginning. Some are handheld lights you can shine on almost anything."

All proceeds from A Velocity of Being, benefit the New York public library system.

Find your wonder in the above read.