The Joy of Reading
When we read, we uncover connections to the people and the world around us. We're transported backwards and forwards in time. I just can't get enough.
I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.
—Jorge Luis Borges
Note: This story was updated to its book version in October 2023.
Whenever I wander through a used bookstore anywhere in the world, I like to pick up an old paperback—a grimy one with a torn-up cover and pencil marks on the pages—and picture not the last, but maybe the tenth-to-last person to hold it in their hands. I picture where it lived before it got there: perhaps on another shelf hundreds or thousands of miles away. Sometimes, on the spine, I’ll find a sticker from a library it once belonged to in a different state. I hadn’t noticed this until the early months of the pandemic, when Knoxville’s iconic warehouse-sized bookstore McKay’s closed indefinitely and I had to resort to ordering books online. They arrived from libraries in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Las Cruces. Why they had been marked for departure, I’ll never know.
“Where was home before it was here?” I ask myself while meandering for hours through the mazy aisles, combing through books with long-forgotten dedications inside the front cover and the occasional handwritten note used as a bookmark by owners who forgot it was there.
On Saturday afternoons when it’s rainy and cold, or I don’t have time or energy for much else, I walk the bookstore like a kid exploring the woods behind their parents’ house. I flip over rocks and look for mysteries. I murmur to myself, with music in my headphones and a list of books on my cell phone. Few things compare to the dopamine spike of coming upon books from that list on a dusty shelf, knowing how much easier it would’ve been to order them through Amazon.
As a boy, I wasn’t an obsessive reader. I was barely a reader at all. My hometown of Bayonne, New Jersey, has a single public library, and I didn’t spend much time there. (The first bookstore I remember walking into was a Barnes & Noble in college.) I did get issues of Highlights and Nat Geo Kids ordered to the house as a boy. This past summer, my brother found a link to an eBay page selling wildlife fact files from the 1990s that I remember my mom buying (from where I have no clue) because I liked looking at the pictures of cheetahs in the Serengeti. We owned a few novels, too—Frankenstein, Tom Sawyer. In the days before handheld computer phones, I flipped through my dad’s fishing magazines and thick texts about coins and Argentinian history that Nono kept in the living room of his apartment, just downstairs from my parents.
My relationship with reading is a slow-burn love affair that ignited during my junior year at Bayonne High School. Mr. Prezioso and Mr. Sweeney, a grumpy pair of old-timey teachers who taught the dual English–history honors course, introduced me to the great works of literature that remain among my favorites: The Great Gatsby; Winesburg, Ohio; Death of a Salesman; and The Sun Also Rises. Learning about the Lost Generation writers toiling away in Paris bars in the 1920s made me envious that I hadn’t been there lingering in the dark beside them. The feeling mirrors the not-quite nostalgia I experience to this day when listening to Nono tell stories of his childhood in Argentina. It’s a time-bending longing, like the kind Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges describes in his 1981 poem “Nostalgia del presente,” which I translated to English:
In that precise moment he said to himself:
What would I not give for the joy
of being at your side in Iceland?
Under the grand unmoving day.
And to partake of the now,
as one partakes of music
or the taste of fruit.
At that precise moment,
he was together with her in Iceland.
When I open a book that once belonged to someone else, I travel across space and time. I become the astronaut Joseph Cooper (played by Matthew McConaughey) in Interstellar, watching from behind the bookcase as a stranger sniffles at the same lines in the same books that now fill the shelves of my office library. I struggle to describe it, just as I’ve struggled for years to articulate to Haley why my books should be out in the open and not hidden away in the basement. “When a new friend sees I own a copy of No Country for Old Men, they’ll want to debate with me about whether I thought the book or film was better—it’s a conversation starter,” I say, as she keeps her index finger firmly pointed toward the stairs, unconvinced by my appeal to her artistic sensibility.
Since high school, my favorite novel has been J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. I’ve reread it five or six times and keep giveaway copies for friends. The book is more than 70 years old; its protagonist, Holden Caulfield, is less than half the age I am today. Yet I find so much of myself in it. There are moments in the novel when Caulfield addresses the reader directly, saying things I’ve said or could say. Remembering a visit to the Museum of Natural History, he muses:
The best thing . . . in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs. . . . The only thing that would be different would be you. Not that you’d be so much older or anything. It wouldn’t be that, exactly. You’d just be different, that’s all. You’d have an overcoat this time. Or the kid that was your partner in line the last time had got scarlet fever and you’d have a new partner. Or you’d have a substitute taking the class, instead of Miss Aigletinger. Or you’d heard your mother and father having a terrific fight in the bathroom. Or you’d just passed by one of those puddles in the street with gasoline rainbows in them. I mean you’d be different in some way—I can’t explain what I mean.
Like all great art, books have this magical ability to connect you to a fictional character living in a time and place you’ll never visit (at least until Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook figure out how to configure virtual reality headsets with time travel features). Tying my own story in with the one I’m reading is how I often judge art’s true value. Is there a lesson for me to take from this? Books aren’t so much an escape into a fabricated paradise or hellscape. At their core, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Philip Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and others like them are portals to alternate universes in which you are still human—where the existential struggle of carving out purpose and finding direction amidst the chaos is as tangible as when you’re sitting on the couch debating whether you should go back to school, buy a ring, try for a baby, or leave home and not come back.
In the movie version of one of my favorite books, The Motorcycle Diaries, a young Che Guevara (played by Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal) is on a road trip across South America with his best friend. At the ruins of Machu Picchu, he asks, “How is it possible to feel nostalgia for a world you never knew?” The answer is not clear to me. But I know I’ve felt it. With an open book in my hands, I’ve transformed, like Borges, into a time-traveling stranger in Iceland, a crime-fighting detective like Sherlock Holmes, a misunderstood war veteran like Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five, a whiskey-drunk writer like Hemingway or Fitzgerald, and countless other versions of myself that may exist in the multiverse of roads not traveled. But how could I ever be those things?
My dad once told me that when we read about war as boys, we all imagine ourselves as the man with the sniper rifle hiding in the trees and not the first one felled by bullets, stones, or swords. Still, it doesn’t hurt to imagine. The best books have inspired me to become more than who I am at this very moment. They’ve inspired me to be a more welcoming neighbor, a more affectionate husband, a kinder friend and braver and more compassionate human being—to be wise, strong, sensitive, curious, and unwilling to pack it in when times get tough.
And if the world is to end, and I get just a few hours left on Earth and a few possessions to carry into alien captivity (or whatever future comes next), you’ll know exactly where to find me: wandering one last time through a used bookstore searching for buried treasure.
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