I’m far from the most talkative person on the planet so it isn’t really a surprise that I have to explain a lot about myself. I know that people read for so many reasons. I think that perhaps I should share mine.

One of the stories I always hear about myself as a baby (and my mom has a picture to prove it) is of me sitting on my dad’s lap while he is reading and in staring at the book just like my dad.

I loved being read to. I used to take over my grandpa’s lap and demand to be read a series of stories. My grandma made me a tape of her reading my favorite stories.

I was around 5 when I learned how to read. I haven’t stopped since.

It’s more than just loving stories, though. I learned that when we move halfway across the country when I was 10. That’s when books became my friends. I got the entire Anne of Green Gables series for Christmas–Christmas Eve. We got in the car and headed east Christmas morning. As soon as it was light enough to read, I opened the first book. Leaving all of my friends behind, Anne and Diana and Gilbert and Matthew and Marilla became my friends. Then there was Jo and Beth and Meg and Amy and Laurie. There were the Boxcar Children. The was the Elizabeth Gail series. And all of the books I could check out from the library. Everything by Marguerite Henry, Walter Farley, Janette Oke, Louisa May Alcott, and Jack London.

I read books on mythology, wars, history, genocide, naturalists, and horses.

I looked up words I didn’t know in the dictionary. I looked up stuff in our encyclopedia. I found new ideas, new people, new places. Books and learning became my new constants.

They still are.

Everything that I read becomes a part of me. So when I share a book without someone, I share a part of me.

*I had friends. But friendship was just never the same after that first big move. I was a transitory kid. A college student’s kid. Then a pastor’s kid. Always in one place just long enough to get comfortable and make a couple of friends to have to pack everything up and move again.