I am a book reader. No matter what is happening in my life, I have a book in the works. Even if it’s just five minutes before I fall asleep at night, I read.  If you ask me, “what are you reading?” I have an answer. At some point, every day, I escape from the “real” world into the world created by a writer.

This morning, I woke up in Montana in the late 1800s. Ivan Doig’s Dancing At the Rascal Fair describes the experience of two young Scottish men who emigrate to Montana and end up outside Gros Ventre, Montana, starting a sheep farm. Doig’s prose evokes a landscape of beauty and isolation as men leave behind the known world to establish themselves in this new wilderness.

Tonight, before I turn out the light, I’ll take a turn in old New Orleans with Ignatius J. Reilly, the main character in A Confederacy of Dunces. It is a book on the edge: the characters threaten to move into craziness at any given moment, trapped in a world of their own imaginations. According to Wikipedia, this book, published many years after Toole’s suicide, is now considered “a canonical work of modern literature of the Southern United States.”

For me, reading is an escape, a chance to connect to worlds beyond my own. I look forward to those moments beyond the day, when an author’s story connects me to a different world. There is no writer, no reader, just the shared language that creates a new place and time where I can be for awhile.

When I taught reading, I wanted to create this kind of world for my students, giving them a chance to move beyond the school day into a world of imagination. We read for 20 to 30 minutes at least three days a week, books they chose, and then we talked and wrote about them. I know that some of them learned to love reading in a way that had not before. I know others couldn’t wait until reading time was over. And that’s OK…reading isn’t something everyone loves. But I gave them a chance to at least decide for themselves and that’s really what matters to me.