Books are a uniquely portable magic. (Stephen King)
Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers. (Eliot)
A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. (Marten)
I just finished a whole buncha beach reading. Yeah! Reading might be a necessity for students, a pastime for a retired person, a pleasure for many, but an exquisite joy for a confirmed bibliophile. I love books. The best birthday present I ever got was a whole six Nancy Drew books when I was about nine — I have never felt richer in my life since then.
Now while the reader may be thinking that’s a sad thing, let me hasten to reassure you it’s not. As a child, reading a book under the covers at night by flashlight was a magic carpet and a passport to adventure that has lasted a lifetime. I was right there with Nancy and George and Bess, tramping on Larkspur Lane, and discovering the Secret in the Old Clock.
Reading not only stirs our imagination, it amuses us, it stimulates our thinking and emotion, widens our mind and our heart, gives us spiritual, intellectual and sensual satisfaction, satisfies our curiosity. We relive the past; we create the future. It can take us away from an unpleasant reality into the world of imagination. Just look at the gleam in the eye of the reader, the furrow of the brow, hear the explosive laughter . . .
Anyway, I probably don’t need to convince you of all that, not if you’re reading this. My very favorite books right now are those that are laugh-out-loud funny. One of those from awhile back was Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, a book that I read once on a long solitary train trip, so funny that my usually inhibited self forgot herself to the extent that I was snorting and guffawing and laughing out loud until it hurt. It is about a zany buffoon of a main character in violent revolt against the entire modern age, a mammoth misfit imprisoned in a world of Greyhound buses and Doris Day movies; the author died too soon; it is his only novel.
Another is a series of books by Betty McDonald from the late 1930s-40s, the best of which I found to be The Plague and I, the true account about her experience in a tuberculosis sanatorium — it should say a lot that a book about a terribly serious illness is that funny. And the Alabama sisters in the more recent cozy mysteries of Anne George are delightful.
Oh, read on, dear readers!! So much is waiting for you.