The great love affair.

Reading. It is the answer to most of my life's quandaries. Like Lora, my copies of Ella Enchanted and Harry Potter have become quite tattered over years and years of perusal. Reading was never something I learned to love, it was how I lived. It was like air, I needed it desperately but did not realize it's presence in my life until years made me wiser and I was able to recognize air and reading for what they were. I am convinced that I would die without books just as I would die without that precious air.

"Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing."

-Harper Lee

I was six-years-old when I read my first chapter book. The Little Leftover Witch by Florence Laughlin. I read the entire book during a four-hour car drive with my mom and sister. I had been so lost within this world where there existed a little witch just my age, that at the end of the car ride I asked my mom if we were still in the United States. I was convinced that we had reached Mexico. That was the beginning of my love affair.

The summer before my senior year of high school, I read Jane Eyre for my honors English class. I had never felt so enchanted by a classic book {it was a marvelous gem compared to the other book we had to read: Heart of Darkness [which I still hate by the way]}. I wrote a paper about Jane achieving feminist liberty and Mrs. Burgoyne hailed it as a work of genius {she was probably just being nice} and prophesied that one day I would be a writer. That was when I knew that maybe my love for reading was a little bit special and perhaps worth something more than I had previously thought.

Then I was thrown into the maelstrom. Austen, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Poe, Byron, Stevenson, Wilde, Alcott, Dickens, and on and on and on. The maelstrom spit me out and now it's me and my books against the world.

"A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one." 

-George R. R. Martin

And it's as though I found myself while reading. Reading has not only been a process of becoming many things and living many lives, but has also been a great and grand adventure searching for myself. I pick little pieces of myself from the pages and the words become pasted messily together to create Me. I am skin, bones, blood, and words.

-Kelly

P.S. I love quotes too. Best get used to it now.

"It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it." 

-Oscar Wilde