Why I read.

I read for the words.

I’m fascinated by words whose sound and shape match their meaning. Moon is round and bone white. Plod falls off the tongue with a soft thud; thud with a heavier one. Dust puffs upwards into the air, the s scattering and dispersing before abruptly being sealed off by the t. Listless has a downward-sloping alliteration, like a bored and beautiful youth staring out the window, chin in hand, waiting for the school bell to ring.

The word wrought twists through its heavy collection of letters like the decorative curls of an old iron gate. Secret begs to be whispered; sinister snakes off the tongue accompanied by a mandatory narrowing of the eyes.

I was once told that the word ‘courage’ comes from the Latin cor meaning heart and age meaning to act: to act from the heart. But I just like the word courage because it sounds kind of like ‘porridge.’ Both words warm you up from the inside. And if you lack one, well, it’s comforting to know the other is easy to come by.

I read for the sentences.

Collections of words that are greater than the sum of their parts. Those lines that stop you, slap you, stick you right in the gut. Maybe for what they’re saying, or maybe just for their astoundingly perfect construction.

Those lines of so few words that are pregnant with so much meaning.

…man seems merely dust postponed .— Alain de Botton

Those metaphors and similes that paint pictures in your mind and anthropomorphise things that you never thought could be given human form.

Rebecca was slave to a crushing melancholia that plundered at will her frail person and lay upon her like a spent lover. — Nick Cave

Those lines you wish you’d written.

I mine for those lines like they’re chunks of cookie dough in a tub of Ben & Jerry’s. The even-better bits in something that’s already the best.

I read for the stories. I read for the information, the entertainment, the advice and opinions and news. I read to travel in time and space. I read to be inspired.

But above all I read because I write, and I write because I read. And neither can be accomplished without those brilliant and hard-working things: those courageous, tasty little words.