Curry Anise Pumpkin Tart And Traditional Pumpkin Pie

Growing up, I loved to read. My dad and I would read out loud together, and I thought that was just the best thing ever. I especially remember reading The Neverending Story, whose title became a self-fulfilling prophecy because we never, ever finished it. That is a long book for a child. 

But despite not finishing that book, we did get through several others, and there were certain books I loved and read over and over. Ella Enchanted? The best book in the world to 9-year-old me. I wrote a letter to Gail Carson Levine and she wrote me back and I thought I was the most special child to ever walk the Earth.

As I got older, my love of stories did not wane, but I had found different sources for obtaining my stories. Television. The Internet. Video games. These all delivered stories much faster, and they were flashy and vibrant. I became a TV junkie, and reading fell by the wayside, much to my father’s dismay. “TV will rot your brain!” he often lectured. “Let it rot,” I droned, zombie-like, while flipping back and forth between Disney and Nickelodeon.

One day, he handed me a bootlegged copy of Gerry Turner’s Stranger from the Depths that he had printed off from the Internet. “I’ll give you $20.00 if you finish this book,” he told me. I read 20 pages of this fascinating book, wished it was a movie, got distracted, and never touched it again. Money clearly had very little meaning to me back then, in an era I like to call The Time Before Utility Bills.

As a teenager, English was always my favorite class, but due to my 100% legitimate diagnosis of Cantfinishanythingitis, I never did find out how Jane Eyre and Oliver Twist ended. But I passed the tests, so I figured I’d call it a wash. I was too busy buying band T-shirts at Hot Topic and putting on excessive amounts of eyeliner to worry about reading. To be fair, all the eyeliner I had caked on may have made my eyelids too heavy to read for any sustained period of time.

By the time I was a senior, I felt like I was literally too cool for school, and barely read anything. I couldn’t be bothered with Holden Caulfield’s ridiculous hunting cap. Wearing something as a protective shield? What a load of crap, I thought, slathering on more eyeliner.

Then I went to college. The social pressures of high school, while not completely evaporated, dissipated significantly in a school with 50,000 plus students. My schedule was my own. I went in as a business major, but instead of taking any business classes, I took Intro to Fiction. For the first time in my life, not only was it okay to talk in class, but it was encouraged, by my professor and by fellow-students. I tore through Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Jhumpa Lahiri’s A Temporary Matter. By the end of winter quarter, I was officially an English major. (This was still in The Time Before Utility Bills.)

The Book of Salt. Mrs. Dalloway. The Brief History of the Dead. The Berlin Stories. Dracula. Corregidora. Middlemarch. Countless poems. I wrote paper after paper of analyses. I loved the way my brain would click into place when I “got” a deeper meaning from the book. How closely linked motherhood and horror are in these books. How forgetting begets anxiety in that one. How the female characters found subtle ways to enforce their power in a world where there is little power afforded to them.

And then I graduated. I had a full-time job and a part-time job and a wedding to plan. I would pick up a book before bed, only to have it drop to the ground from my limp hand as I drifted off to sleep. I always plan to get back to reading, but it has become the lowest priority on my list. The Picture of Dorian Gray stares sadly out at me from the mantel, barely half-read after two years’ time. The Unconsoled languishes in my bed side table, never once opened, the price tag still on the cover.

Last night, I read nearly to the end of The Road, a book so grim and desperate it makes me question my faith in humanity. But it has restored my faith in reading.