It's Love Month...

And I'm not going to be sad because I am single. I really prefer to think of Valentine's Day as a day to celebrate all those things that you love about your life and all those people in it that make it better. And so as a precursor to Valentine's Day, I am going to write a little bit about something I love.

I love lots and lots of things, of course, but I want to just extol the virtues of books for a moment. I love them, obviously. I read them once in a while. They've offered me so much over the years.

The love affair started with the likes of Little House on the Prairie and Anne of Green Gables. I remember the shade of summer and the back porch. I think if ever I was lost somewhere, you could probably find me curled up with a book.

When I was a girl, and sort of awkward and I didn't have much of a social life - junior high is the absolute worst time in the entire world - I took a great deal of comfort in books. Books offered lots of distraction and plenty of escapism. I really wanted, then, to live in New Jersey. I had no idea. But that is where The Babysitters Club resided, and so of course I wanted to be there and I wanted to go to the Jersey Shore, and of course, all of this is because I did not know about the Jersey Shore, but then again, this was pre The Real Housewives craze and all the nonsense that ensued later, so what can I say? I think that The Babysitters Club is pretty perfect reading for young girls...it's jut good, clean fun.

And of course, my mom really wanted to be get into the classics, and maybe she feared I was brain damaged because I just didn't want to read Jane Eyre. But when I did, oh boy, that book changed my life forever because it was pretty much the most romantic story I've ever heard of, and I wanted to be Jane. It was soon after that I discovered A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a book I read only for the title...isn't it just the most beautiful title? Oh it is. And so I think I read that five times. There were many others...Gone With the Wind, The Great Gastby, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird. Let's not forget To Kill a Mockingbird, my favorite book in all of high school. And then there was 1984 which was horrible and fascinating and probably the most provocative book I had read to date.

College was nothing short of perfect for me, even though I thought, for a time, that I would not major in English. Why I ever contemplated anything else is beyond me now, but I got over it. I got smart. The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Sun Also Rises, Madame Bovary. Honestly, it was probably the best time ever because I was learning so much and talking to students and professors who shared a passion for what I loved.

I think as I've gotten older, books have become many things to me...mostly a chance to escape and a chance to inhabit another world, for a moment. I love stories, really, and I love being told a good story.

So here is to the first day of love month...I love books!