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. \u00a0If 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.<\/p>\n
This morning, I woke up in Montana in the late 1800s. Ivan Doig’s Dancing At the Rascal Fair <\/em><\/a>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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a><\/em>. 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\u00a0<\/span>canonical<\/a>\u00a0work of modern\u00a0<\/span>literature of the\u00a0<\/a>Southern United States.”<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. \u00a0If you ask me, “what are you reading?” I have an answer. At some point, every day, I escape from the … Continue reading A Meditation on Reading<\/span>