I'd like to thank Lisa for inadvertently giving me the push I needed to get my ass back into reading. Over the summer she sent me Blue Like Jazz and, I'll admit, it took me a while to remember to pack it in my bag whenever I went out, but once I did, and starting reading it on my commutes, in coffee shops, while doing my laundry... I rediscovered my love for books.

When I was younger, I read like a fiend. I read your classic little-girl books - the Baby-sitters Club series, Sweet Valley Twins, the Boxcar Children, the American Girls Collection. I read Judy Blume, the Ramona books, Norma Fox Mazer's A My Name Is... series. I practically lived in the library, always had my bespectacled face in a beat up paperback, my mind turning furiously, noting small details, names that stuck in my mind forever. (Who could forget Moose, who mowed the lawn in Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret?) I can still tell you the line that defined the moment I realized that there was so much more to writing than telling a straight story: it was in Silver, by Norma Fox Mazer. She was describing a woman in a bathrobe; "there was a rip in the pocket." And it just hit me - it's about images, the moment. It's about experiencing each moment along with the characters.

I was a voracious reader all though middle school, and high school. I gladly read our assigned books for English class - until I hit senior year and enrolled in AP English with Mr. Strauss, an effeminate, old-worldly sophisticated man who crossed his legs and wore nubbly sweaters and wire-framed glasses. He, by all means, should have been a college professor, and I wasn't prepared for the level of insight and analysis that he expected from his students. We read Dubliners, Sons and Lovers, damned if I remember any more of them because I'm pretty sure I didn't actually read them. My ability to process such thick text just wasn't developed enough, and I was lost.

At Haverford, there was very little question that I was going to major in English. It wasn't so much that I loved to read; it was that I loved to write. My first literature class was American Gothic Literature; we read such dense and infuriatingly vague gems as The House of Seven Gables, The Turn of the Screw, and of course, some works by Edgar Allen Poe. Throughout the rest of my college career I took Shakespeare, English Epic, and Chinese literature courses to fulfill my pre-20th century lit requirements, but they pained me. I quickly found that I loved my modern fiction classes more - Asian-American Literature, Contemporary Women Writers, Violence in Contemporary American Literature... I connected with the books in a way much deeper than I could ever relate to Shakespeare. They opened my heart, and were real to me. They made me want to write.

My senior thesis was a novella; I had been chosen for a Creative Writing concentration with my major, and my assignment was to write a novella, then write a critical introduction to it that studied it alongside other, published, works. I found this to be interminably fascinating, albeit slightly daunting - part of me wonders how I would do it if I were to recreate the assignment now. Through that experience I began to read with different eyes. Repeated symbolism jumped out at me after I had knowingly planted it in my own writing, and I started to see meaning deliberately embedded between lines, weaved within words.

After I graduated, I stopped reading, with the exception of indulgent reads like Harry Potter and the Unfortunate Events series. Lisa and I even tried to start a book club, but neither of us could simultaneously get into the books we chose. I read a novel here and there, but was never inspired nor recommended to pick up another after I finished each one.

But now, since Blue Like Jazz, I've read The Namesake (Jhumpa Lahiri), Lucky (Alice Sebold), The Glass Castle (Jeannette Walls), and I'm about to finish The Memory Keeper's Daughter (Kim Edwards). And I'm just so moved, all the time. I'm riveted to the page, falling asleep with my book, visibly reacting to the words I'm reading no matter where I am. Today I didn't want the subway to reach my stop because it meant I had to close the book and get off the train. I've got several books on deck: Little Children (Tom Perrotta), The History of Love (Nicole Krauss), The Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe), My Sister's Keeper (Jodi Picoult), The Interpreter of Maladies (Jhumpa Lahiri) and a re-read of the entire Unfortunate Events series, now that all thirteen have been released.

I just love the idea of all these stories held in my hand, carried with me on my traipses through the city. Everything is tucked away in those words, they hold so much weight just waiting to be unraveled by my eager, careful eyes. I want to collect them all in a pile, whole lives and worlds shut away in each book, bursting with endless possibility.