I read the way alcoholics drink. Martinis, Crown, a deeply red, almost chewy Burgundy. Fiction. Non-fiction. Biography. Real or virtual. I’m a reading whore. Is there a book that changed my life? No. Reading saved my life.

I read my way out of a miserable childhood. When I was in second grade and came across the original The Boxcar Children, it was if I had come home. In third grade I remember Treasure Island as my first experience in sheer literary terror. My hands literally trembled as I held the book. Nothing in real life could be as terrifying as the black spot. In high school I loved A Separate Peace, and hated The Catcher in the Rye. My God, what whiner. Years and years later when friends named their son Holden, I thought: really? I thought you people were more interesting than that.

I’m never without a book. Most recent pleasures: non-fiction, Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto and Better; fiction, The Goldfinch, Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Bookshop, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street; biography, Oliver Sacks, Born to Run.

A couple of summers ago, The Daughter and I spent three weeks wandering around Italy and France on the heels of a summer international dance workshop she attended in Florence, during which time I read thirteen books on my Kindle. Standing in museum lines, on trains, in cafes for our 3 p.m. glasses of wine, we read. She was working her way through The World According to Garp. She finished it in Bologna, at our favorite cheap cafe. As she slapped the book closed, I began to say, “In the world according to Garp,” and she chimed in, “we are all terminal cases.”

Reading will save you.