You elect which world you enter and what knowledge you procure there.

People like me open books and inhale the binding, favoring the scents of certain glues over others, breathing them in like incense even as the chemicals poison our brains.

It’s the perennial reader’s fantasy, the hope that the right book will magically spur strangers into intimate and telling conversations or elevate your standing in the eyes of people you already know.

Nancy Drew taught me that a book wasn’t merely about the words within, it was everything—the quality of paper, the intoxicating smell of the binding glue, an older formulation that you didn’t get in newer volumes, the decorative end pages. It was the book as object, the vase as much a pleasure as the flowers.

To whom do books belong? The books we read and the books we write are both ours and not ours.

the effects of inevitable change on a place you know and love, even as your memory clings to the familiar contours of its past.

it was okay and even right to read what you wanted rather than what you ought.

Reading time became my time and place, another dimension where events operated by my own set of rules.

things I wanted to remember: what I was reading when all that happened.