Lost in a Good Book

I've thought about making this site for a very long time. I had the fortune of growing up in an vast world of adventure and curiosity sated. Anything I wanted was at my fingertips, and I could spread the pages of my novels like the wings of a bird and fly to any location in this world and far off places that live in a stranger's imagination. I studied magic in Tamora Pierce's Emelan, and survived through an earthquake, a pirate attack, a caravan fire, and a deadly plague. I understood the Lisbon sisters in The Virgin Suicides, remembering all too well what it was like to be a thirteen year old girl aching for the sweet release of death and the silence that follows. I've been to ancient Greece, and the pages of the Iliad and the Odyssey became my triremes on the Aegean, wishing so desperately that poor Hector and Andromache's fates were not so dim. I cried with Dave Pelzer as he recounted the rolling thunder of his horrific childhood, and enrolled in university just a few months later to start this wild ride to become a social worker.

I lost myself when I turned eighteen, and seven long years later I have rediscovered the magic of words and the power of a book to warm me after seven years of apathy and the cold beating of a novocaine heart. There is no feeling like the catch of breath when a story twists like a snake's coils, and your stomach ties into knots and releases with the elation of a new idea of how the story ends; no feeling like the heat that rises to your cheeks when you read a passage full of passion while around someone else, and the tiny, secret upturn of your flushed lips when you realize that you're reading something so dirty in public. There is no drug like the bubbling laughter that comes up without warning when a particularly witty writer engages you with a clever play on words.

In all, books have been my whole heart. I am starting this blog to discuss my reads since I was diagnosed with the mood disorder, post traumatic stress, anxiety, addiction, and depression that kept me away from being able to focus on more than a sentence or two at a time. My treatment and therapy have been highly emotional and my sanity ebbs and flows like the coming of a swift tide or the veil the moon casts over Her glowing face. One thing this year has been a constant, and that is the comfortable black and white of text on the smooth texture of a good book.