I’d Rather Be Reading

I’d Rather Be Reading Plot Summary

Introduction

Reading is not merely a hobby or pastime; for some of us, it's a lifestyle. We're the kind of people who understand the heartbreak of not having library reserves arrive before vacation and the exhilaration of finding a new release by a favorite author before its publication date. We know the pain of investing hours in a book only to be disappointed by its ending, and we know the pleasure of discovering exactly the right book at exactly the right time. These experiences shape us as readers and as people, creating the interior architecture of our minds. When we talk about reading, we often focus on the books themselves, but so much of the reading life is about the reader as an active participant. A book exists not only as printed words on a page, but as whole worlds brought to life in our imagination. To readers, those books are more than objects - they are opportunities beckoning us. When we read, we connect with them in a personal way that can be tricky to navigate but brings endless delight. There are few one-size-fits-all prescriptions for the reading life, and in exploring our personal relationships with books, we discover not just what shapes us as readers, but what we bring to the page, how to choose good books, and what happens when we read bad ones.

Chapter 1: The Pages of Our Lives: How Books Shape Our Identity

I wouldn't be the person I am today if I weren't a reader. This isn't just because I enjoy reading or spend so much time with my books. From an early age, without consciously intending to, the ideas I encountered in books formed the interior architecture of my mind. As I read, my brain was busily constructing a framework from the pages, building a mental structure I would continue developing for years to come. At this point in my life, I'm mostly moving the mental furniture around and hanging new art on the walls, but every so often I add a new room or relocate a load-bearing wall. I'm long past the point of starting from scratch; I can only work with what's already there. I can't name every title or author whose words have become bricks in my mental house; their influence snuck in too long ago or beneath my conscious awareness. But some authors occupy such an outsized place in my mind that I can almost point to the specific bricks their works put in place. One such author is Madeleine L'Engle, who first won me over as a child when I encountered A Wrinkle in Time, and later as a young mother when I began reading her memoirs. When I encountered her phrase "the tired thirties" to describe the decade when she would often literally fall asleep with her head against the typewriter, I knew she could be trusted. L'Engle knew something about the stages of a woman's life, and she wrote frequently about the process of growing up and growing older. L'Engle once wrote, "The great thing about getting older is you don't lose all the other ages you've been." She believed we carry all our previous selves with us throughout life. Every adult has arrived there by passing through childhood, the teen years, and their twenties. But according to L'Engle - and I'm inclined to believe her - not every person can access their inner child, teen, or twentysomething self. Surely you've met someone and thought, "It's impossible this person was ever a child." I'd like to think I can still access my inner four-year-old - curious about the world, skeptical of her little brother, innocently kind, occasionally cruel, always trusting. My inner seven-year-old - full of imagination, turning the creek bed behind my house into a fantasy kingdom. My inner seventeen-year-old - falling in love for the first time, feeling very grown-up making decisions about her future, and at the same time, very young. I'd like to add an addendum to L'Engle's theory: just as I'm all the ages I have been, I'm all the readers I have been too. It's taken me decades to figure out what kind of reader I am, and "what kind" is probably inaccurate: I've been many kinds of readers over the years, and I remember them fondly. I'm still the three-year-old on my father's knee, begging him to read The Story of the Apple again and again. I'm still the eight-year-old who innocently filled her school reading sheet with over a hundred titles, unaware that the class average would be somewhere around thirty. I'm still the cautious ten-year-old sitting in the fifth-grade classroom listening to her teacher read Where the Red Fern Grows aloud, witnessing an entire classroom dissolve into tears. I'm still the earnest high school student writing her first term papers, feeling pleasantly grown up as I trekked to the downtown library for research on Saturday mornings. I'm still the nineteen-year-old college freshman goggling over my first Annie Dillard, Eudora Welty, and Isabel Allende, and struggling through David Hume and Erik Erikson. I'm still the thirty-year-old discovering the pleasures of returning over and over again to a good novel, the reader who learned that you don't have to be a kid to read kid lit. I'm still the thirty-five-year-old who has the house to herself and a zillion things to do, but spends two hours in an uncomfortable kitchen chair, finishing a novel because she has to find out what happens next. My head is so full of musings and insights and ideas from books that I'm not sure who I would be or how I would think if they were all taken away.

Chapter 2: The Books That Find You at the Right Time

Sometimes, despite my best efforts to plan my reading life, a book unexpectedly finds me and not the other way around. I don't carefully plan exactly what I'm going to read next, and in what order. I may walk into a bookstore and leave with my next read at the emphatic urging of an excited bookseller. Maybe three unrelated people recommend the same book to me in the course of a week, and I decide to take the hint. I don't carefully plan - and yet it's uncanny how often I seem to be reading just the right book at just the right time. I've learned that sometimes a book compels me - or someone feels compelled to recommend it - for reasons I can't discern, and only later do I find it's essential to me, right then. Not before I started reading it, but after. The book may seem random when I choose it, but halfway through I realize, "I need this right now." Call it chance, or fate, or divine providence. Blame it on probabilities or my own state of mind. Credit it to dumb luck. I just know it's served me well to pay attention to subtle hints, and that includes hints about books. A decade ago, it seemed like everyone I knew was telling me to read Dallas Willard's The Divine Conspiracy. I snatched up an inexpensive hardcover on the remainder table at our now-defunct local bookstore - and didn't read it. Years later, something inspired me to pick it up again. I began reading, a few pages at a time, finding it wasn't the kind of book I could read quickly. I was a few chapters in when my son was unexpectedly diagnosed with something scary, out of the clear blue sky. He was fine, and then he wasn't - and it happened fast. He was diagnosed just before lunch, and by dinnertime we were on a plane to visit a world-class medical specialist. We packed in a mad rush, tossing essentials into our suitcases, including our current reads. Had I been in the middle of a legal thriller, or fluffy romance, or parenting book, I would have grabbed that. But The Divine Conspiracy was the book on my nightstand, so that book - about living right, and living well, and beginning to do so right now - accompanied me to unfamiliar doctors' offices, airplane terminals, hotel rooms, waiting rooms, recovery wings. Willard seemed to be speaking only to me, telling me exactly what I needed to hear, moments before I needed to hear it. He told me how to hang in there and how to hang on, how to get my head straight and my heart settled. I couldn't have asked for a better companion for that journey. If this has happened to you - if the right book has almost magically appeared in your life at the right time to hold your hand for the journey - you know it feels like a special kind of grace. A few summers ago, Parker J. Palmer's Let Your Life Speak was the book I couldn't escape. I owned a copy and had been meaning to read it for years, but kept putting it off. When numerous friends and acquaintances happened to bring it up over a week or two, speaking of its importance in their lives and asking if I'd read it yet, I paid attention. I took the hint and moved it from my bookshelf to my nightstand. In it, Palmer wrestles with vocation and calling and making tough decisions in these areas - topics I'd been wrestling through myself, although my fellow readers didn't know that. It was the book I needed, right then. Why this book, or that one? I never know at the time. But sometimes it's more apt to say the book seeks me. I've learned books move in mysterious ways, and I'd do well to pay attention. Sometimes these serendipitous reads are of big-picture, soul-level importance. But sometimes they're right in more prosaic ways - a book that makes you laugh when you desperately need comic relief, or provides practical advice about something you're struggling with, or delivers important information just before you need it.

Chapter 3: Coming of Age as a Reader: From Assigned to Chosen

It's a truism that early reading shapes the reader you become. We look back wistfully at the books we read on our parents' knees, the ones we read under the covers with our flashlights, the ones we giggled over with friends. Then there were the books we read in school, from kindergarten to high school and maybe beyond, under the guidance of other readers who hopefully illuminated their meaning. But then it happens: school is over, classes are done, and we become responsible for our own reading lives. Nobody else is in charge of what we read; those decisions are now all ours. Now we choose what kind of readers we want to be; we choose which pages will fill our lives. We don't enter adulthood as fully formed adults, nor do we enter adulthood as fully formed readers. When I graduated, I knew I still had a lot of growing up to do, but nobody told me I had to grow up as a reader too. Every reader goes through this rite of passage: the transition from having books chosen for us to choosing books for ourselves. When given the choice, some choose not to read. But you, dear reader, moved from being told what to read to choosing for yourself - from reading on assignment, perhaps to please someone else, to reading at your own leisure to please only yourself. Like other kinds of growing up, this doesn't happen overnight. The transition happens slowly, over time. We make a reading life by reading, and we stumble as we figure it out, learning through trial and error not just what to read for ourselves, but how. We establish not just that we will be readers, but determine what kind of readers we will be. Luckily, I didn't know all that as a young reader. In my early twenties, I was wholly occupied with establishing my new adult life: I graduated from college, started a new job, got married, and moved into my first house. That was enough adult pressure to deal with; I'm glad I didn't know then that over the next few years I would set the course for my reading life as well. When I think about growing up as a reader, about coming into my own as one and claiming responsibility for my own reading life, the scenes that play out in my head are from this early era. Those formative years in my early to mid-twenties left an indelible mark on the person and reader I would become. Those first years are when I laid the foundation I'm building on even now. When you're not sure what you should read for the rest of your life, the library is a good place to start. So I went there, often, sampling widely. We passed books around our circle of friends, rarely getting together without coming or going with a book in hand. Plus my husband and I each brought our own book collections to our marriage, childhood favorites and other titles we'd picked up along the way that remained unread. Book lovers have strong feelings about bookish scents; some of us get poetic about the distinctive smell of freshly inked paper, or old cloth-covered hardcovers, or a used bookstore. As a devoted reader, I've noticed how the books themselves serve as portals to my past, conjuring powerful memories. There's something about glimpsing, and especially handling, a book from long ago that takes me right back to where I was when I first read it. The book triggers memories of why I picked it up, how it made me feel, what was going on in my life at the time, transporting me so thoroughly that, for a moment, I feel like I'm there once again. By my mid-twenties, I'd made the transition, establishing myself as a reader, coming into my own as one, carving out a space for my own reading life. Today I'm not the reader - or the person - I was at twenty-five; so much has changed in the intervening years, as it should. But it's then that the foundation was laid, in my fledgling first years of adulthood, when I made my reading life my own.

Chapter 4: Bookish Connections: Finding Community Through Reading

Sometimes I fantasize about getting my hands on my library records - not just my current checkouts and pending requests, but my complete library history like a historical document. My bookshelves show me the books I've bought or been given, but my library books come into my house and go out again, leaving behind only memories and a jotted line in a journal. I long for a list that captures these ephemeral reads - all the books I've borrowed in a lifetime of reading, from last week's armful spanning back to when I was a seven-year-old kid with my first library card. These records would preserve what my memory has not. I remember the highlights of my grade-school checkouts, but much is lost to time. How I'd love to see the complete list of what I chose to read in second grade, or sixth, or tenth. Based on my borrowed titles alone, I'd be able to clearly see the months and years I spent away from my hometown, the summer I got engaged when I checked out every book on wedding planning in the library system, the month I learned I was pregnant and immediately cleared the shelves of those books. The sudden surge of board book checkouts a year later, after we'd added another tiny reader to our household. It's all right there, in my library records. Reading is often viewed as a solitary act; that's one of the reasons I love it, and it's certainly my favorite escape and introvert coping strategy of choice. But reading is also a social act: readers love to connect over good books. If I read a book that legitimately changes my life, or a book that becomes a new favorite, or even a breezy novel that's tons of fun, I can't wait to talk about it with my fellow readers. So when a friend asks for a favorite book, I answer cautiously - but how could I help but answer? Nothing ventured, nothing gained - and I've found talking about books to be a reliable shortcut to getting to the good stuff with our fellow readers, to cutting to the heart of what matters. That makes it a little dangerous, a little risky. When we share our favorite titles, we can't help but share ourselves as well. Shakespeare said the eyes are the windows to the soul, but we readers know one's bookshelves reveal just as much. It took me thirty-five years to find my book twin - that remarkable reader whose taste bears an astonishing resemblance to my own. At first glance we might seem one and the same, practically interchangeable. But those who know us well can tell us apart, seeing our similarities but also our subtle differences. We're not bound by blood or formal ties. We've never shared a last name or an address or even Thanksgiving dinner. Our twinness is confined to our reading lives: she's that reader whose taste bears an astonishing resemblance to my own. My reading life has been better since I found her, simply because she steers me to read more of what I enjoy and less of what I don't. From the vast array of titles published every year, how am I to find the books I will love, the ones that will feel like they're meant for me? Two readers can cover more ground than one. My twin discovers books I might otherwise have missed, she enthusiastically recommends books she's read and knows I will love, she sacrifices herself by reading a promising-sounding book that proves to be forgettable, thus saving me the time. I do the same for her. Despite initial appearances, we aren't identical, and we've learned to vet books not just for ourselves, but for each other. She's comfortable going a little darker; I'm comfortable with more stylized prose. She has more patience for the magical; I'll put up with the sappy. We know each other's tastes, and we each read more great books than we used to, because we've discovered a shortcut to finding the good stuff.

Chapter 5: Reading as a Journey: Revisiting Books and Changing Perspectives

My parents moved into their current home when I was two years old. One advantage to their not moving while my brother and I were growing up was this: upstairs in the corner bathroom is an old strip of paint on one side of the door frame. My parents have taken good care of their home, but this door frame hasn't been painted since shortly after they moved in. That's because once my brother and I were able to stand on our own, my mom measured us against that door frame every so often, recording our current height with her pencil, marking our growth. As we were growing up, we could look at both the current and past markings to see how much we'd changed. Like so many readers, I maintain a virtual shelf of books I'd like to read one day. Despite my neglect, this shelf holds 819 titles I would very much like to read someday. I'm far from alone with my massive To Be Read list, and I doubt my number even counts as "massive" by some readers' standards. Despite this list, which will surely not only remain unfinished when I die, but grow ever longer until then, I am an avid rereader of good books. Many devoted readers, lovers of good literature, never read the same book twice. Their TBR list is too long to justify spending time on books they've already read, they say. I'm sympathetic to their point of view. But I'm not about to change my rereading ways. I've found that a good book not only holds up to repeated visits, but improves each time we return to it. Thousands of years ago, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man." That growth chart in my parents' house isn't being updated anymore; I'm long past the stage of growing three inches a year. But I am still growing, changing - not the kind of growth you can measure against a door frame, but the kind you can see measured against the books I've read. When I find myself in a dreaded reading slump, nothing boosts me out of it faster than revisiting an old favorite. Old books, like old friends, are good for the soul. But they're not just comfort reads. No, a good book is exciting to return to, because even though I've been there before, the landscape is always changing. I notice something new each time I read a great book. As Italo Calvino wrote, "A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say." Great books keep surprising me with new things. Sometimes this has to do with my point of view, with what I know when I open the book. The first time I read a book, I immerse myself in the story. I'm not concerned with catching every nuance; if it's truly a good book, I couldn't do that even if I wanted to. The first time, I want to find out what happens. Who are these people in the pages, what do they want, why do they matter? On my first pass, I'm figuring it all out. On the second pass, the experience is qualitatively different. Read Anne of Green Gables once, and you're shocked when she cracks the slate over Gilbert's head. Read it the second time, and you read that scene through the lens of knowing everything that will come after. I experienced this vividly when I reread Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety for the fourth or fifth time. Stegner's work continues to improve for me on each successive reading. The book opens with unfamiliar characters, approaching what is soon to become a deathbed. The first time I read the book I was confused: I didn't know these people, or why they were gathered, or how they'd ended up here, or what they were feeling. The second time, when I already knew the intricacies of the plot, I was caught off guard by my immediate tears. I had been unprepared for the difference, but there it was: this time I knew these people, and I stepped immediately into their sorrow. It was the difference between glimpsing a stranger's funeral procession from afar and participating in a loved one's, up close. That book wasn't quite the same when I read it again, but not just because of what I knew about the book. No, the book was different because I was different. Since the last time I read the book, my own reality had changed. Rereading can make you remember who you used to be, and, like pencil marks on a door frame, show you how much you've changed. The first time I read Crossing to Safety, I was younger. When I reread it recently, I had more experiences to draw on as I read, having done some growing up in the interim. I knew more of friendship and love, of loss and suffering. When we revisit a book we've read before, we see how life has woken us up to understand passages that previously went over our heads.

Chapter 6: Creating a Personal Reading Legacy: The Art of Remembering

Have you had the experience of browsing through a good photo album? Maybe it was one with photos of you as a kid, or from a trip you took to Paris or Prague or Pittsburgh. You didn't remember that restaurant, or that haircut, or that sunset over the river - but when you see the photo, it all comes flooding back. When I go on vacation, I prefer to live in the moment instead of recording the moment. Taking photos to memorialize the experience isn't as fun as actually experiencing it. But I feel like taking those photos is a gift to my future self. They'll let me continue to remember and enjoy the moment months, years, even decades from now. That's how I feel about my reading journal. Show me a cover of any book I've read, and it will take me right back to where I was when I read it. Books are portals to all kinds of memories - but only if I can remember that I read them. Ask me the best books I've read this year and a half-dozen titles might spring to mind - but no more. If I can't see it, I can't remember it: off the top of my head, I'd be lucky to recall a quarter of what I've read. Last month is hard enough, but last year, or five or ten years ago? My memory lets me down. But paging through my book journal brings it all roaring back. I would rather be reading than memorializing what I'm reading; I'd rather experience the thing than record the thing. But I've grudgingly learned to do it anyway, inspired, I'm sorry to say, by pure envy. A friend has been diligently tracking every book she's read for the past twenty-plus years, since she was a kid. Her book journal is in a cheap spiral notebook - nothing special to look at - but when I first learned of it, I was inordinately flooded with envy. Some readers meticulously record the dates they read each title and where they were when they read it. They note favorite quotes, memorable scenes, and key insights. My friend's log was just a list of titles and the dates she read them, but the quantity of data - the sheer number of books read over more than two decades - served as a travelogue for her reading life. I didn't have my own, but I wanted one, badly enough that I began. Mine is nothing special, just a simple log noting what I read, and when, with a little star to mark my favorites. It's not fancy, but it's mine. Since my conversion, I've become excessively interested in how other readers document their reading life. Some keep simple logs like mine. Some assign star ratings or grades or percentage scores. Some log pages and pages of character studies and quotes to remember and the ideas that made them stop and think. Some readers are loyal to certain websites, or apps, or social media platforms. Some couldn't live without a thick-papered journal and a fountain pen, or their trusty spreadsheets, easily searched and sorted. Every reader's journal is its own sort of amazing. And yet I sometimes find myself relapsing, not recording my books for a week or two, when my preference for living in the moment wins out over my desire to document for my future self. It's embarrassing to admit, but without logging what I read, I forget all about it. I retain the ideas, and remember them when they're triggered, but without referring to my journal, I can barely remember what I've been reading. With my personal log, however, the title alone can serve the same purpose as that photo in the vacation scrapbook. My journal doesn't hold a pretty photo to admire, but my brain is eager to fill in the book's details. It conjures a mental image of where I was when I read it, where I got it, and why I picked it up in the first place, as well as what I thought about it. Reader, if you'd rather live in your reading moment than document it, I totally get it. I'd rather be reading too. But learn from my bookish regret: I don't care what system you use (and I use the word system loosely) as long as you use one. Start today, because as soon as you begin, you're going to wish you'd begun sooner. Record your books as a gift to your future self, a travelogue you'll be able to pull off the shelf years from now, to remember the journey.

Summary

Books are portals to all kinds of memories and experiences - they shape not just our reading lives but who we become. When we read, we connect with stories in a personal way that can be tricky to navigate but brings endless delight. The best books move us, drawing out the full range of emotions, sometimes even breaking our hearts. As readers, we continually evolve through different seasons of our reading lives, from having books chosen for us to choosing them ourselves, from reading on assignment to reading for pleasure. Along the way, we discover kindred spirits who share our literary tastes and help us find the books that seem meant just for us. We are readers. Books grace our shelves and fill our homes with beauty; they dwell in our minds and occupy our thoughts. Books prompt us to spend pleasant hours alone and connect us with fellow readers. They invite us to escape into their pages for an afternoon, and they inspire us to reimagine our lives. Good reading journals provide glimpses of how we've spent our days, and they tell the story of our lives. Whether we're revisiting old favorites or discovering new treasures, whether we're reading alone or sharing stories with others, our reading lives reveal who we are, who we've been, and who we might become. In the end, the books we choose become part of us, forming the architecture of our minds and the contours of our hearts. Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading.

About Author

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Anne Bogel

Anne Bogel is an author, the creator of the blog Modern Mrs Darcy, and host of Modern Mrs Darcy Book Club and What Should I Read Next? podcast.She is the author of My Reading Life: A Book Journal, My Reading Adventures: A Book Journal for Kids, Don’t Overthink It: Make Easier Decisions, Stop Second-Guessing, and Bring More Joy to Your Life, I’d Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life, and Reading People: How Seeing the World Through the Lens of Personality Changes Everything. Anne lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with her husband, four children, and a yellow lab named Daisy.

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