thanks to invisiblestories:

Someone asked, “What do you find in all those books you read? Or I guess I should start further back on that course and ask: what do you look for? Truth? Understanding? Peace? A way back? Forward?”

I’m sometimes unnerved by the incongruity between how all-consuming books are to me and my inability to speak about what they mean in any but the most trite, secondhand way. To say that I find inspiration or delight or truth in books is so obvious as to essentially say nothing. Those are a few of the standard, agreed upon effects books have on their readers.

I should be in possession of the vocabulary by which one can generalize about books, yet it seems I am not.

I toyed with offering a list of books on my bedside table, a sort of bibliophile’s Anecdoted Topography of Chance, but that seems slightly off mark, an effect rather than a cause. “What do you find in all those books?” isn’t the same as asking “Why are you reading William James or Landscape and Memory?” (Both of which are on that table.) It’s more a question of temperament and motive: Why do you read? Or, perhaps, Why do you continue to read?

Someone once commented that I read as if my life depends on it. Despite (or because of?) the not necessarily complimentary tone of the statement, I’ve been unable to evade the observation since. I do read as if my life depends on it, which is to say: I read because I am alive and want to remain so. (Which may be paradoxical since reading, like writing, distances one from living.) I read because I don’t know what it means to find oneself in a world that seems to lack meaning beyond what we project onto it. I read to ceaselessly remind myself—I have a terrible memory—that there are ways of being in the world that I am incapable of conceiving on my own. I read because a single imagination does not seem enough.

But I also read to be bewildered. I don’t often find myself “lost” in a book, but am often disoriented by them. When life feels as if it’s been reduced to a series of discrete habits and actions that somehow seamlessly blend into a cohesive whole, a series of patterns that constitute a life, reading becomes a necessary reminder of possibility, even if it’s solely done for possibility’s sake.

Of course, I read for entertainment, for joy, to learn. I read to fight against my inherent pessimism, to find sentences and sentiments that correspond to my feelings, but also to throw my feelings against something alien. I read to pass the time. I read to avoid thinking about my own problems, or to wallow in someone else’s. Currently, I’m reading to bring winter into this balmy city.

So, yes: facts and understanding; ways back, forward and lateral; peace and discord; and truth as well, as long as we define it loosely.