It was almost brief.

I've written so much about volunteering and 'enough' and finding time and making babies lately that I'm afraid, if I do it again today, I'll only make you mad ("speaking of ENOUGH, Andrea..."); so I'll use them handy-dandy bullet things to say:

1. Jen and Mad are having their baby shower today. Go have some cake and stick a gift-ribbon on their hair, and see the tremendous pile of shower gifts they're sitting on.

2. I am undergoing Screening Processes, since my volunteering options are the kind where they Screen you, to make sure you aren't a criminal trying to get access to vulnerable populations. So, no details yet, but it's still going to be 24 hours this year. The plan is the Big Sisters--they have group programs for volunteers who can't commit to the full 8 hours a month (the prospect of which makes me faint) and I love kids, and it will be good to work with people instead of trees and dirt, which is more my normal thing.

3. I'm also going to be interviewed about it tonight by the lovely and talented Bon over at Chrib Chronicles, around 9 pm Ontario time, and you do the math elsewhere. The link will be here. Bon and Jen and Mad and I will all be talking about the social justice wedding stuff, or at least we will at the beginning.

See? That was short. I can do short.

~~~~~

OK, I can't do short.

Hey! It's a day to read!

And you're here. Oops. So am I. So I'm going to tell you, first of all, that turning off the computer to read something print-based is a lovely idea. And secondly, since Friday belongs to Frances around these parts, I'm going to blather a bit about books today.

I taught myself how to read when I was three, according to my mother; and I see no reason to disbelieve her since my only memory of kindergarten is of sitting in the cloakroom with a grade-five student who volunteered to show me flashcards of words like "telephone" and "dinosaur" while I heard my friends outside drilling the alphabet. Thus I have no memory of a time in which I did not understand what letters are, how they are put together into words and how they connect with each other to form sentences, how the sentences link to make stories. I have no memory of a life before books. This makes it strange to see Frances tottering slowly towards literacy herself as I try to make this process conscious and show her how it all works.

Books are magic. I am an addict, and I'll admit this clearly makes me biased, but books are magic. Each one is a potent little package of incremental transformation. It mixes our own mind with someone else's, and when we pull back again, neither one is quite the same for the experience. A book makes a reader, and a reader makes a book. That object you hold in your hands and for which the bookstore charges you (or the library swipes your card) is not, properly speaking, the real book. The real book is what happens in your mind while you read it. That physical object, all those pages with black marks on it, is just the means of transmission.

Every book you read is yours and yours alone; it exists for you and because of you. The particular experience you have in your mind while you read it will not be duplicated by anyone else. No one else will see Anne or Gatsby or Huck or Peter Pan the way you did (until they make a movie of it, anyway). The author wrote it and lots of other people worked to get it to where you could pick it up; but you closed that loop and made it a book by letting it into your mind.

The internet doesn't do this very well yet, I don't think, because it is difficult to make your mind as open and receptive as it needs to be when your monitor is giving you eyestrain, your mouse is giving you carpal tunnel syndrome and your uncomfortable chair is giving you a backache. It is difficult to resist the temptation to skim, to skip, to click away when it gets difficult or challenging. I don't know if I can think of even five instances where something I read on the internet connected with me in the same place as a really good story or novel does, that left me saying "yes," even though I wasn't quite sure what I was agreeing to, or with, only that in some way I couldn't explain what I had read was the truth, regardless of its lack of factuality. The right book in the hands of the right reader at the right time can do this. It's magic.

If I were to even try to list all of the books that have closed this hidden loop in me, while I am closing the loop of that book while reading it, it would take an entire blog's worth of posts, and you would get bored of it long before I would. They change, of course; if you and I never read the same book because the experience in our minds is not the same, then it is also true that you and I never read the same book twice, because the experience on re-reading will not be the same, either. Some books worsen, and some improve. (Some are like comfort food and we re-read them to get the same experience again but I wonder, actually, if that's an illusion and it changes more than we recognize.)

Books are teachers and friends, counselors and prophets, therapists and clairvoyants, healers and lovers, magicians and heretics. Nothing else can do what a good book does, because a reader is not a watcher or observer but a participant. The words of a book are an intricate lattice with far more space than substance; space which you, the reader, fill in. That's work, and that's what makes the book yours. I think it was Margaret Atwood who said that no matter what it looks like, writing is a performance art; and she was right, and the audience, too, is up on stage, filling in the scenery, singing the chorus, and supplying the cast. That's what makes books special; and they are special, dammit. They're not just movies on a page.

Frances can't read yet. She knows her letters and understands that they make sounds and is beginning to understand that the sounds can be put together to make words. But she's not quite there. She certainly won't be reading "dinosaur" and "telephone" next year. But I don't care. I don't care how or when she learns to read (although I suspect that her teachers at a certain point might begin to hyperventilate). All I care about is that her current delight with books continues. All I want is for her to be able to pick up a new book with the same sense of anticipation and incipient pleasure that I do, looking forward to hours in one sense spent curled up under a blanket on the overstuffed armchair with a snack and drink to hand; and in another, equally real sense, spent in another life, another time, another place, another self.

Posted by Andrea at January 10, 2008 12:00 PM under Books , Friends and Others

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