How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen Page B

legs akimbo, in that chair with a book, Jamaica Kincaid was sitting in the glare of the Caribbean sun in Antigua reading in that same way that I did, as though she was starving and the book was bread. When she was grown-up, writing books herself, winning awards for her work, she talked in one of her memoirs of ignoring her little brother when she was supposed to be looking after him: “I liked reading a book much more than I liked looking after him (and even now I like reading a book more than I like looking after my own children …).”
    While I was in that club chair with a book, Hazel Rochman and her husband were in South Africa, burying an old tin trunk heavy with hardcovers in the backyard, because the police might raid their house and search it for banned books. Rochman, who left Johannesburg for Chicago and became an editor for the American Library Association’s
Booklist
, summed up the lessons learned from that night, about the power of reading, in a way I would have recognized even as a girl. “Reading makes immigrants of us all,” she wrote years later. “It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere.”
    While I was in that club chair with a book,Oprah Winfrey was dividing her childhood between her mother in Milwaukee and her father in Nashville, but finding her most consistent home between the covers of her books. Even decades later, when she had become the host of her eponymous talk show, one of the world’s highest-paid entertainers, and the founder of an on-air book club that resulted in the sale of millions of copies of serious literary novels, Winfrey still felt the sting as she talked to a reporter from
Life
magazine: “I remember being in the back hallway when I was about nine—I’m going to try to say this without crying—and my mother threw the door open and grabbed a book out of my hand and said, ‘You’re nothing but a something-something bookworm. Get your butt outside! You think you’re better than the other kids.’ I was treated as though something was wrong with me because I wanted to read all the time.”
    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, runningaway 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.
    By the time I became an adult, I realized that while my satisfaction in the sheer act of reading had not abated in the least, the world was often as hostile, or at least as blind, to that joy as had been my girlfriends banging on our screen door, begging me to put down the book—“that stupid book,” they usually called it, no matter what book it happened to be. While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
    There is something in the American character that is even secretly hostile to the act of aimless reading, a certain hale and heartiness that is suspicious of reading as anything more than a tool for advancement. This is a country that likes confidence but despises hubris, that associates the “nose in the book” with the same sense of covert superiority that Ms. Winfrey’s mother did. America is also a nation thatprizes sociability and community,