Guest Post from Diana

Today's post is from Diana!  She shares a memorable reading experience in her post today and discusses how other books have affected her life. You can also visit her blog and see what she has to report on her 2011 resolution to read at least one book per month and post about it. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts, Diana...especially since I know things just barely (or hardly?) settled down a bit for people in your line of work!

While it might not be the first book I ever read, the first one I remember reading by myself is the book "Wolf by the Ears" by Ann Rinaldi.  I sat in my pajamas in our living room surrounded by Christmas wrapping paper after the presents were open, reading and totally hooked.  The book is about a possible child of Thomas Jefferson by his slave Sally Hemings.  It's not classic literature, but I was engrossed at age 9 or 10.  As someone who used, and uses, books to escape a world where I sometimes felt uncomfortable in my own skin, I found this tale of a girl caught between two worlds strangely relatable.  Harriet Hemings faced a decision about whether to "pass" for white in a society where the the shade of your skin determined your status.  

What I loved about this book was that it made me step outside myself and ask what I would do in such a situation.  Clichéd as it sounds, this book opened a portal into a new world and made slavery real to me in a way that years of visiting Virginia battlefields and learning about the Civil war in textbooks did not.  It created a character who I identified with and helped me understand the tragedy of slavery's toll on a personal level.

And that's an aspect of literature that I love - the ability I get to step into the shoes of different worlds, places, and people and learn things about myself, relationships, and the world at large.  Whether it's traveling the galaxy with Ender Wiggins, reading the story of an illiterate teenage mother in New York City, stopping by the island of Guernsey post-World War II, or dropping myself into a modern presidential campaign, I get to visit magical book worlds.  These worlds teach me things about people and about myself.  Books can nudge us or startle us out of our "thinking ruts."  Reading "The Brothers Karamazov" changed the way I thought about my religion.  Jane Eyre teaches me about acting for good in a sometimes inexplicable and unpredictable world.  Anne Shirley reminds me to find zest in life and look for the "White Way of Delight" in what other people may see as a prosaic path.  Even though I hated parts of it, Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'ubervilles" taught me about relationships.  And Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy just makes me laugh when I need to.

So while I've moved on to other books with smaller print and bigger words, I still have "A Wolf By the Ears" on my bookshelf almost 20 years later.  It's a testament to how important the written word is to me.  I'm grateful it started me on the delightful habit of curling up in my pajamas with a good book.  In fact, I'm off to do that now!