Growing up, I always had an enthusiastic love of reading. Self-taught at four, my parents didn’t even believe I could read, and instead assumed I had deftly memorized the books they read me so often. Challenged to read from the newspaper, I stunned them all by reading straight from the page. Then came school, and reading for fun quickly fell out of fashion. I was required to read so much that the thought of adding extra “work” voluntarily seemed silly. So I took a two decade long hiatus from my hobby. Through high school, college and graduate school, I read what was required of me, no more, not much less. After grad school my brain was broken. I had used up too many brain cells digesting the works of Foucault and Aristotle, Kenneth Burke and bell hooks. Some loved, some….not so much, but brain cells just the same.

I needed a BREAK. So I bartended. I went out at night. I spent lazy days on the beach flipping through magazines. I rode my bike wherever I could as much as I could, especially on the weekends when I made it a point to not get in my car unless it was absolutely necessary. I found myself riding my bike past a huge, beautiful library, both inviting and intimidating at the same time. On a particularly hot day I decided to go inside even if it was just for the cool, yet musty, air. I walked the aisles, my hands gently touching the spines of the books. Always a tactile person, the idea of reading a book any other way was borderline offensive. The smell, the feeling, the colors of the books called me in a way I couldn’t resist.