There's a book I don't remember well, though I can remember precisely where I found it in my elementary school library -- three yards to the right of the door, in the middle of the third shelf from the floor.
I was, and remain, a compulsive reader. Back then, I read on the school bus, at the bus stop in the cold, at the dinner table, beneath the sheets and for hours sometimes in the only room with a door that locked, the bathroom, despite my sister's pounding. This book was about a solitary little boy who, as I did, had a nervous habit of tapping everything he touched, and counting the combinations of taps. One day, he tapped a wall of stone. A door appeared. Behind it was a different world, not better really, but brighter and less dull. I read for the same reason that he tapped: to look for doors, to push through walls.
-- Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel "The Suitors."
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Confession: I am an abuser of books. I break their spines; I underline passages with felt-tip pen. Once, on vacation, I actually dropped Joyce Maynard's delectable "Where Love Goes" -- a beach-book "Anna Karenina" that I like to re-read every three years -- into the Jacuzzi. For my books, it's spring break at Ft. Lauderdale and they're scared. This is all to the horror of a fusty male friend who keeps his British first editions in a humidity-controlled room, as though they were wine. I see now, though, that my 7- and 8-year-old daughters have caught their mother's bad habit. Across the back seat of our filthy wagon are capsized or spread-eagled "Goosebumps," Jenny B. Joneses, "Beastmasters." They are smeared in juice and Cheetos, and, to my horror recently, I saw this terrifying pink thing called "The Puppies of Princess Place" covered in ants. But, as my girls pointed out, ants like a good read too. Indeed.
-- Sandra Tsing Loh is the author of "Mother on Fire."
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One of the best ways to read is to re-read. Because sometimes it requires too much courage to pick up a new book.
My literary hedges against depression:
"Brideshead Revisited," by Evelyn Waugh. I love these characters as if they were my own crazy family. Why would I, from a clan of buttoned-down Dutch Protestants, be so attracted to insane English Catholics? I only know that when I am low, the mysteries of the loves (and hates!) in this book fill me with hope. And Waugh's similes are magician's tricks.
