HOW READING CHANGED MY LIFE.

This is the first book I picked up in 2014.Anna Quindlen talks about her passion for books and how she fell in love with them even as a child.She tells us about the books she has read and enjoyed and how they transported her to different places and cultures.It is a paean dedicated to the love of books.

There are several quotes in this book which really stay with you long after you have finished reading it.To quote a few:

"A book--the book that was for some reason,THE book--can be reread unchanged.Only we have changed.And that makes all the difference"


"It is like the rubbing of two sticks together to make a fire,the act of reading,an improbably pedestrian task that leads to heat and light"

"There was waking,and there was sleeping.And then there were books,a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did,a universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger.My real,true world.My perfect island."

This resonates with the way I feel about books.In a nutshell ,this is a book about books and which goes on to tell us how reading can change lives.There is also a small cache of reading lists at the end of the book.

MY views:

It is an interesting book and I could relate to most of what she said.However she talks about not being comfortable with the electronic transmission of books.This was something I did not agree with but considering that the book was written way before the advent of any e-book readers I let it slide.Incidentally I read the e-book and not the actual hard copy.I liked the book as I always like to read about what other peoples personal journeys in the world of books is like.I realized that people over the world might have completely different reading choices.I did not agree when she says that some books are to be read at a particular age and no one can read them later.I don't believe that is true.Any book can be read at any point in time.Maybe you enjoy it more if it is read at that particular age but that really does not mean you cannot savor it later.

However this book lends an insight into reading.It is something which one would pick if one enjoys reading a lot.

I loved one quote in particular and the one I could relate easily to:
"Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world’s great nomads, if only in our minds. I travel today in the way I once dreamed of traveling as a child. And the irony is that I don’t care for it very much. I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books. This is what I like about traveling: the time on airplanes spent reading, solitary, happy. It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home."