This Post About Reading is Secretly About Writing

It'd been a long time since I really sat down to lose myself in a book.

I had lots of good reasons. I was in the middle of a massive rewrite and didn't want to have other stories in my head when I was trying to focus on that one.

I was getting my husband through his last year of college, and he'd just lost his job, so I had to choose how I used my time.

I was tired. I was making dinner. I don't know. Lots of other excuses, I'm sure.

But it was Christmas Break, and we were going to be on a plane for six hours on our way to vacationing with the rest of the family. And I packed six books.

I was ready.

Ultimately, I only read one of them, but that's okay. It was amazing.

I bet you've heard of it. It's called The Book Thief.

I opened up to the first page, and before I even got a few lines in, I literally gasped out loud with delight. I'd never fallen in love with something this quickly. The poetry of even the first page, the unique narrator, the asides, everything about it was perfect.

I turned to my husband excitedly and waved the book in his face. "This book," I said, "is amazing."

He looked at me with this expression sort of like, "That's great, honey, but stop disturbing the other passengers."

I devoured the book. I was a third of the way through it before our flight even landed. Then, of course, I got distracted. I took all sorts of pictures of everyone at the beach because I was the designated photographer for our family. Not because I'm good at photography (seriously, Becca is clearly the photographer here on Ographies) but because I'm terrified of the ocean and the only way I was going to get involved in beach shenanigans was by documenting the whole thing.

We were out in Hawaii for ten days. On the eighth day, everyone went snorkeling except for Mom and the littlest kids . . . and me and my husband.

He took a nap. I finished The Book Thief.

I don't think I can adequately describe what it's like to read that book. It's just . . . perfection. Every single line seemed to dig its claws deeper into my soul. I was so tightly hooked that I managed to forget that the narrator had spoiled the ending at the beginning of the book and as I sat there in disbelief at [SPOILERS] massive character death happening all around me, well, I just cried.

I cried and cried. Silent tears, the kind that you cry when you're reading because, wow, you've got to read the words on this page, and those tears are very definitely in your way of getting any reading done.

It's something very private, I think. The crying while you read. Because in that moment, you are inside the world of the book, so taken in that you feel the emotions the characters feel. You are drawn into the world, and it's real to you in that moment, and that's why we read. Because it's a new place and old emotions.

I managed to clean myself up just as everyone was getting back from snorkeling, but I never did quite recover. I still cry just reading reviews of that book.

And that's what books do, I think. I still grin like a loon whenever I read the line: "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit." I am still a proud member of the "Fred Weasley Death Denial Support Group." I even flipped through the Jewel Princess series I read when I was, like, eight, and I still smiled through the whole thing.

Books are our companions. They are milestones in our life journey. They mean something to us the first time we read them and then something new the second time.

That's why we read them. That's why we write them. Not out of some grand, deluded idea that we can influence the world, but maybe we can capture it. That small little piece of truth, a memory, a feeling, preserved in pages.

A little slice of humanity, bound and printed. That's what a book is.