Today, I am sitting in my favorite place in the whole world, drinking my second jar of iced tea, surrounded by climbing umbrella plants and drinking in the cavernous, bright space. I’m also crying, because I just started and finished Casey McQuiston’s Red, White, and Royal Blue in a matter of mere hours, turning pages after pages, my eyes darting between words, unable and unwilling to stop myself from devouring it all at one time.
I used to be a voracious reader. When I was a kid, I used to read and read fast. I used to read fantasy, science fiction, adventure — and love it. There weren’t so many screens, and I escaped into books.
And then something changed. Through middle school and high school, it was dystopia upon dystopia. It was Lord of the Flies and The Crucible, Brave New World and Catcher in the Rye. One woman was ostracized by her whole society and another walked into the ocean to drown. I struggled through the literary thickets of As I Lay Dying and the visceral gore of Life of Pi.
I read books that hurt to read, that murdered every happy moment with immediate and relentless tragedy and left only hopeless, broken characters and killed all the joy I had for reading and loving stories.
For a while, fanfiction was a safe place. It wasn’t the same as feeling a book’s spine expand at my touch, and my eyes strained reading incomplete stories about familiar characters in unfamiliar situations, but there was spark of joy in reading it. But then people in power tend to reveal the worst parts of themselves, and a whole safe place can evaporate all at once and fanfiction soured in my mouth.
I turned to nonfiction, but it’s not the same. Sometimes nonfiction is a reassuring voice, but it’s mostly a literary podcast, an avalanche of interesting information — but not a story.
So maybe that’s why reading a book that was fun to read knocked me over so hard and caused me to burst into tears in public. I haven’t laughed at a book like that in years. I’ve never seen myself in a book like that. It made me feel young again, made my brain feel fresh and exhilarated, somehow ready again to dive into it all.
I even hesitated to buy it in Bookmans this morning, laden with nonfiction and my partner’s selections. It was fiction, after all. I hadn’t even read a sentence of fiction in years. I thought that part of me was irreparably damaged. And I have never been so happy to realize that it isn’t.
I want to read more for pleasure. I want to be recommended a book and to feel good reading it. I was to reconnect with reading and unplugging, turning off my phone and ignoring a world that wants to notify me of things that don’t matter as much as the pages between my fingers.
I love reading. To protect me and heal myself, I need it. And I’m overjoyed that I found it in me again.
Today is a good day.