I am a frequenter of elipses... I love to read the literary text of people, whether they be words on a page or written on their faces. That may sound cliche, but it's existent, nonetheless, and so I read.
My first encounters with literature are a bit hazy. I remember a book called Adventures in the Big Thicket (written by the author Ken Gire) with tall tales from a character-colorful thicket, beasts of the wild who wore leisure suits and sipped at afternoon tea, that my dad would read from as my brothers and I drifted to sleep. I can still hear, in my mind, my mom's loving voice as she took us through a Precious Moments volume set, filled with life lessons of caring and sharing. I loved to listen to reading.
But, to be quite honest, the art of actual reading bored me. The thought of staring at mundane word-after-word, page-after-page--I could watch and watch the text and it would never do anything, unlike the television set--sounded like work, not entertainment.
As one gets older and grows in the education system, though, one is elequently forced to take part in and enjoy (or bite one's tongue about) literature. My seventh grade year, a book report was due in two days and I hadn't yet picked one. I feel like this is a situation that most people can attest to having experienced. My librarian, feeling sympathetic and knowing the abstract individual growing within me, suggested a book called The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snickett, the first installment in A Series of Unfortunate Events.
I was hooked. The rest is unwritten history. I dove deeper and deeper. My tastes grew darker and darker. The spiritual realm in fiction looked magnificent and edgy. A series of caves to be searched and explored. A deep, secretive ocean that is forboding to all but the risk-taker. Such a large sum of the Christian society today chooses to wade in the shallows, but I found myself plunging beneath the surface, where less light is shed but the water--OH, the water!--grows colder all around me the further I go. It's a feeling as refreshing and as time-limited as any corporeal experience. Eventually the euphoria ends and I must resurface until I find the next thrill ride that pulls me down to that oceanic abyss.
Literature matters, period. I don't want to imagine a situation in which it doesn't because I love to parallel real-life situations with scenarios I've walked alongside a main character through. Even with the few works of nonfiction that I have read, literature is so relevant and recurring in my mind. It is so involved with life that to pull its thread at this point would cause a heartbreaking fray.
I collect a lot of my favorite books but readily set them into the hands of anyone who will taste of my tastes, get to know one of my preferred works and so get to know me that much more. It means the world to me that someone would want to read a book that meant enough to me to buy. That they would entrust their time to my judgement, and their literary lives as I place in their hands the rock that will sink them to the watery depths, and challenge them, too, to plunge beneath the surface...
