Taken From Books

I imagine those of you who read this are also "readers". By that I mean you buy a book when you know you'll re-read it. You have a shelf of favorites-from-childhood, the books outnumber everything else, and somehow, there are never enough bookshelves.

This means that there are things in those books that you've always promised yourself you'll try someday. This past Christmas I made that Christmas Cake. I've been promising myself that since reading Betsy and the Great World, by Maud Hart Lovelace.

One of my favorite plays is "The Lady's Not for Burning", by Christopher Fry. I learned about that not in school, but in Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean.

Those are only two examples; I have more. Now, there are also the ones you can't understand: in spite of repeated readings of Little Women, I have never learned to love Milton or even The Pickwick Papers (the only Dickens I love is A Christmas Carol.

This gift within a gift of books suggested by favorite books is only one of the reasons I've been a lifelong reader, but it's a potent one.