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Reading By Yourself, Together With Others. Literary Festival, Anyone?
When being well-read is ultra-cool!
Connections to books, reading, and writing
When I was a kid, I was the one who buzzed with excitement the day of a book fair, wanting to get in early to have time to browse all the books, and then have time to calculate the maximum number of books that I could purchase with the small budget my parents had allotted.
As a teenager, I didn’t date much because I was both nerdy and naive, much preferring to stay home and read a book than go out and socialize.
In the last two decades of life with my husband, my favorite “dates” were the Saturday afternoons we would drive the thirty-five minutes to browse at the Barnes and Noble, spending hours reading magazines, loitering in the aisles, sipping coffee and relishing big cookies before piling up our purchases and heading home, where we’d continue to delve into our treasures.
My favorite gifts relate to books, bookstores, or writing materials. So yes, compared to others, I get turned on by the strangest things. Ideas that seem like torture to others, (doing nothing but reading for hours; spending time writing pages of notes; using vacation days to do research and write drafts) are rip-roaring fun to…
