My first memory of reading is also one of my earliest memories. When I was three years old, my older sister started kindergarten and evenings at our house became reading practice sessions as my sister worked her way through Dick and Jane with my parents' help. I would perch on the back of the couch above my sister, peering down over her shoulder to catch a view of the book and eavesdrop on the story. One night, my sister stumbled over a word, and my dad urged her to sound it out. I was impatient for them to just get on with the story, so I blurted out the word. My parents were astonished, and my sister has never let me read over her shoulder again.
As a child and teenager, books were my escape. I loved series books - the Anne of Green Gables series, the Chronicles of Narnia, A Wrinkle in Time and its sequels - books that dragged out the story so that I could become completely caught up in the characters' lives. Those characters became real to me, and every time I finished one of those series, I felt a deep sense of loss, as if I had just said goodbye to a good friend. Later, I fell in love with the classics: Jane Austen, George Elliot, E.M. Forster. Throughout my life, books have been constant and reliable friends.
In 2002, I graduated from college with a degree in literature. I had always wanted to be a teacher, but my husband was still in school and since we needed money, I was forced to take the first job I could find. I was working eight to ten hours a day plus driving an hour to work each direction. Somehow, I was able to fit in a little reading time, but my busy schedule didn't allow for much socializing. I looked around for a book club online and ended up joining a discussion of Oryx and Crake that included the author, Margaret Atwood. The club was great - Margaret Atwood actually responded to one of my comments! - but there were so many members that I was forced to devote lunch breaks to browsing through the hundreds of postings. I didn't have time for that! Disappointed, I gave up on book clubs for awhile and tried to content myself with reading alone.
Two years later, I had the opportunity to quit my job to become a stay at home mother. "Aha," I thought, "Now I'll have plenty of time to participate in a book club!" This time, I decided to try the traditional route and join a club in my area. What fun! A whole night out with no kids, no husband, no responsibilities, and a bunch of women talking about books. It would have been perfect....except that having the club on the same night every month began to conflict with other commitments in my busy life.
Again I was disappointed, but this time I decided to take matters into my own hands. I needed a place where I could discuss books, and if one didn't already exist, I would have to create it.
If you're like me, you agree that reading is just not as much fun if you don't get to talk about it. Books are meant to be discussed. Writers do not write so their ideas can be tucked away on a bookshelf gathering dust. Books are meant to be reflected upon and ripped apart and shared. A good book should haunt you with its ideas so that the desire to talk about it bubbles inside you until you just have to get it out.
Have you ever read a book that you're bursting to discuss, but no one you know has read it? Or a passage in a book really strikes you, so you share it with your spouse or best friend, and he or she responds casually, "Hmmm...." Or maybe you have been in my situation: you just couldn't find a book club that fit your schedule.
The Reading Lounge is the solution. It's a place where you can be passionate about reading in a community of readers who are just like you - people who take books with them everywhere they go, people who can't pass a bookstore without stepping in, people who willingly sacrifice precious sleep time to finish one more chapter, people who just plain love to read. A good book deserves to be discussed...at The Reading Lounge.