How Reading Changed My Life

It’s the birthday of contemporary columnist and fiction writer Anna Quindlen. I have always found Quindlen to be one of the most intelligent and thoughtful writers of our time. She was born in 1953 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Barnard College in 1974, she became a reporter for the New York Post. Later, she joined the New York Times, where she worked until 1995, writing popular columns such as “About New York” and “Life in the 30s.” In 1992, Quindlen won a Pulitzer Prize for her nationally syndicated column, “Public and Private.” She has also written four novels, numerous nonfiction books, and two children’s books. Her novel One True Thing was adapted for the screen in 1998. Until recently, Quindlen wrote a regular column for Newsweek. In her essay, “How Reading Changed My Life,” she writes

Like so many of the other books I read, it never seemed to me like a book, but like a place I had lived in, had visited and would visit again, just as all the people in them, every blessed one—Anne of Green Gables, Heidi, Jay Gatsby, Elizabeth Bennet, Scarlett O’Hara, Dill and Scout, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot—were more real than the real people I knew. My home was in that pleasant place outside Philadelphia, but I really lived somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books and those books were more real to me than any other thing in my life. One poem committed to memory in grade school survives in my mind. It is by Emily Dickinson: “There is no Frigate like a Book / To take us Lands away / Nor any coursers like a Page / Of prancing Poetry.” ...

Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. “Book love,” Trollope called it. “It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live.” Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort—God, sex, food, family, friends—reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in that chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room. I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.

The complete text to Quindlen’s essay, “How Reading Changed My Life” appears in Mirrors & Windows, Level V.