From my earliest memories, books have been a central part of my life. They were my only friends when others didn’t seem to notice me. They brought comfort when the world around me seemed to be crumbling. They were a means of escape when I felt trapped in my life. They gave me a way to travel worlds outside of my small Oklahoma town from the comfort of my bedroom with the pink walls and polka dot sheets.
I remember the day my teacher placed the first book I ever read myself into my hands. I was a tiny kindergartener who refused to take naps. Instead, I would talk with those around me, distracting them from the task at hand. It was probably the only time in my life I ever got in trouble for talking during class.
My teacher called me over, away from the slumbering class, and handed me the dusty children’s book. She taught me to make out the words along the cover that read “Jack and Jill.” The faded yellow pages held drawings of a little girl and boy as words spread across the pages. It was as if someone gave me the key to a new life.
After that, I couldn't stop. While others were avoiding books at all costs, I was hiding Junie B. Jones novels under my desk and reading them whenever I got the chance. I traveled across history with Jack and Annie in their magic treehouse and wished I had one of my own to whisk me away from my quiet town. The days I met Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are forever memorialized in my mind. I grew up with them battling monsters and wishing I had a godly parent and magical abilities.
My worldview changed as I devoured The Hunger Games and Divergent. I realized that anyone could change the world, no matter how small or ordinary they were. I stole books with the book thief, the first story to ever truly make me cry. I threw myself into fictional worlds vowing to live as many lifetimes as I could as if my life depended on it. I read as if I was running out of time. And slowly, I did.
Soon, I left my childhood behind. Gone was my childhood bedroom filled to the brim with books. It was replaced by a dingy dorm room and college textbooks. My life changed around me in a flutter of goodbyes and well wishes. Classics filled my time now. Though I saw their merit, I never truly enjoyed them like the stories that had shaped me growing up. Soon, I began to resent the thing that had always brought me so much joy. I didn’t touch a book for my own enjoyment for well over two years and I felt like a fish out of water.
But then everything changed yet again.
Once more I found myself on the edge of a great shift in my life. Strangely enough, I was in my childhood home again though I had since gotten rid of the dusty tomes that used to litter the shelves. The world was falling apart, though much more literally this time than when that strange earth-shaking feeling had found its way to me before.
I found myself reaching yet again for a book. I wanted to escape. I needed to be away from the fear and the news shots of hospitals filled to the brim and families losing what could never be replaced. I scrolled through my little hometown library’s app and picked one. Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo. It looked promising. A college student with a shaded past. An ivy league school with an underground ring of magic societies. The synopsis reminded me so much of the books that made me fall in love with reading all those years before.
I couldn’t put it down. I finished it in between shifts in the trucking manufacture I found myself working in to pass the time during those long first few days of the pandemic. Then I reached for another one. A Court of Thorns and Roses. Delirium. Legendborn. I found myself once again living between the pages of books.
And I haven’t looked back since.
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