“Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but more important, it finds homes for us everywhere.” ~Jean Rhys
As a girl, I would often curl up with a book about whatever world had most recently captured my imagination. It has always been so easy to to get swept away and lost deep in the pages to another place or time. I often heard my parents say, “she’s a million miles away.” And yes, I was. Literature has that power. There is something magic about the writen word. It gives you the amazing ability to see through another’s eyes, think with someone else’s mind, and experience someone else’s story. Though there is no substitute for having your own adventure, armchair travel is a remarkable way to transcend your personal, financial and dimensional limitations.
In this picture, my niece is carrying forward the book-worm legacy by reading The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black and Tony DiTerlizzi. She is lost in a world of magic that overlaps and seeps into ours. As for me, I’m reading The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova and it’s taking me on my own supernatural journey through the streets of Amsterdam, the fields and beaches South of France, libraries and mosques of Istanbul, Oxford in London, and now the hotels and homes of cold-war Budapest. We are both a million miles away.
Are you one of us? Are you a wanderer of the written road? Whether you consider yourself an armchair traveler or a vacation researcher or just like to read a good book on the plane, drop a comment and share what the journey into a book is like for you.
Follow the story.