Ask any dedicated reader and they’ll tell you that they have a treasured few books that they return to time and time again. Know you’re going to be stuck on a train or a coach? Want to fill a few minutes with the familiar delights of a well-loved tale? Or maybe you like to check in with a long-standing paper friend, just to see if you’re still as close as you remember?
Books, music, scents and photographs – they all possess a magical power to reconnect us with the past in a visceral way. Knowing this, every time you choose your reading matter with discernment, each book you read seeps into your DNA. Sometimes it’s an author’s entire works, rather than a single book, but the same principle applies.
Richard Bach’s A Gift of Wings is one such book for me. Just holding the battered cover transports me through time. I’m on the Staten Island ferry, heading for Manhattan, and wondering how to spin my disaster of an American Dream into a more positive adventure. (Back then, I’m also wondering if I could write a book about it but that’s a post for another time!)
I can see myself now, a bagel in one hand and A Gift of Wings in the other, breathing in the salt-sea air as I devour Richard Bach’s collection of old articles and short stories, especially the ones that speak of limitless possibility and the freedom to shape my own destiny. I glance up, periodically, watching as Manhattan looms ever larger, and the water glistens like a molten, silvery sheet. And I whisper to the stern sky, “This is the moment I have chosen.” Ah, bless.
I rarely read the book from cover to cover, in order – I have my favourites there too. Over the years, those preferences change, and so does my attitude towards them sometimes. I guard against the internal ‘tsk-tsk’, where the jaded, cynical side of my nature swamps the bright-eyed optimist to mutter despondently, ‘Yes, well, it’s fine for you to think like that, but look at the life you’ve been able to lead.’
I know differently, of course. I only have to look at my own, meandering path to recognise that choices are made every day and consequences pop up around us like daisies. I started reading Richard Bach’s books in 1983, long before A Gift of Wings joined my travelling bag for $3.95 from some un-named bookstore (but probably Weiser’s).
I know too that all writers write a version of themselves – a ‘who I wish to be or be seen as’. But then, don’t we all?
My comfort reading list also includes:
Illusions – Richard Bach
Jonathan Livingston Seagull – Richard Bach
Wuthering Heights – Charlotte Bronte
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Secrets of Dr Taverner – Dion Fortune
So what’s on your list?
Leave a Reply