If you sniff books, use outdated terminology frequently, and are easily recognized by librarians...

...you might be a reader.

The other day, I was talking with a stranger while we waited in line at the grocery store.  We were looking at the magazines and I brought up the new Hunger Games movies and asked if she had read the book.  She looked at me strangely and said, "I'll just see the movie.  Anyway, how can you read just for fun?"

I died a little inside.

 Um...this is exactly what I want to be doing.

I have been reading for fun since I learned to read when I was three by following along as my parents read aloud.  In school, I would sneak books out to recess and find abandoned corners of the playground to read them.  Sometimes, I got so absorbed in the book that I wouldn't hear the bell ring to bring us back in and would scuttle back to my classroom late.  In middle school in Montana, where you go to recess unless it is ten degrees or lower, I made friends with the librarians so they would give me passes to spend time reading inside while my classmates played "avoid the frostbite" outside.

I got in trouble for reading under my covers on school nights, hours after I was supposed to be asleep.  I would sneak away at friends' houses and be found later in a closet with one of their books.  I would spend parties going through bookshelves.  Wait, why am I using past tense?  I still do that at parties.  Just in a more clandestine way.  I hope.

Would have married whoever did this for me.  On the spot.

To those of you who don't understand compulsive readers, let me try to explain.  When we read, we become something else.  We enter worlds that exist nowhere else.  It sounds like metaphor, but seriously.  In those hours that we are reading, our minds and hearts are not sitting in a coffee shop or sprawled over a couch.  They are slaying monsters and exploring new landscapes.  Reading takes us from lives that are predictable, normal, or mundane and lets us be heroes, friends, champions.  Our hearts are pierced by sorrows not our own and lifted by love not ours while we read.   Also, we may start talking or writing as if we don't sound ridiculous.  Because, in our minds, we don't.

It carries over into our regular lives.  After reading, we feel things keenly.  We are acutely aware that everyone around us has a story unfolding around them.  Life becomes more vivid.  Surroundings take on a new dimension when viewed through the lens of a story in progress.  There is color, light, meaning in everything.

Does that sound romantic?  Ridiculous?  Dramatic?  Silly?  That's fine.  We are all those things.  And we're not afraid to be.  Because when you read, there are far worse things than being thought odd or eccentric or strange.  We fear being boring.  Expected.  Common.  And reading takes us past all that.  So that even if we are office workers, teachers, waitresses to others, we know we are more.  We live a different life with every book we read, every character we get pulled in by.  It shapes who we are, what we want, and what we believe we are capable of.

Reading makes us more open to looking ridiculous.  We learn to accept that there could be a lot out there that we don't see, that we don't know everything.  And I think that's beautiful.