National Read Across America Day

I love to read.

All my life, through good times and bad, books have been a refuge, a special spot where I could loose myself in another world and bask in the wonder, beauty and sometimes horror of another person's words. When I was small, I was fortunate enough to have a mother who read to me. She read us Tolkien, one of her favorite authors, and I have a particularly vivid memory of being curled up next to her and my older brother, listening to her read to us in Smaug's voice from the Hobbit. It was entrancing.

As a teen, when I couldn't relate to people and vice versa, books were my escape to worlds where there were others like me. Stephen King, Margaret Weiss and Henry Miller all fed my soul and my imagination and I am a better person for it, even if I've never succeeded in being normal.

Nowadays, as a woman who works from home and has three tiny, demanding and frequently irrational bosses, fiction has become my refuge again. I read romances, science fiction, horror and intrigue, YA or adult, so long as it takes me from my world into another. Preferably one where with strong heroines and witty dialog!

Every year there are even more great books, in every genre, as writers keep doing that thing they do. And today is National Read Across America Day, in honor of that icon of early childhood literacy, Dr. Seuss.

So please, in his honor and for the benefit of all humankind, take a few moments out of your day today and read. Read for yourself, read to a child, recommend a great book to a friend. When we read we become better people, if for no other reason than we have listened to a new voice.