I love reading books about books and reading. Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life is a short excursion into this author's relationship with books throughout her life. You can read more of my comments on this book at my book blog by clicking here.

This book is ready to begin its travels! Mailing off to Jinglefish today ~ enjoy!

Received safely today thank you. Am just finishing off one bookring read (sent to me by Haugtussa who's next in line for this LOL!) and will then be straight into this one. I love the bookmark - think I may well "steal" the idea.

This is a very quick read that reflected my thoughts. I'm quite sure most of us here in this community will agree with most of what was written although we may disagree and argue on the contents of the suggest reading lists at the back of the book! I would have perhaps enjoyed it more if the topic had been expanded further.

Thanks for sharing Cinammon-Girl. Will be moving on in next couple of days.

Posted to Haugtussa today:-)

The book made it through the rain and arrived safely today!

I liked the book, and certainly did recognise most of what the author stated. Especially the first part of being a child only interested in books! I remember being 7 years old and reading Nancy Drew books the entire summer...

I'll send it off as soon as I hear from bluecat07.

The book is being posted to bluecat07 today.

The book arrived today safe and sound. Thanks for sending it, Haugtussa!

While I was in hospital last week I read this one morning. It was quite entertaining to read about the preferences about a fellow reader.

I have PMd Lisa for her address so that the book can travel soon.

Thank you so much for this ring, Cinnamon-Girl!

Edited 7.9.07: The book is now on its way to Lisa-B.

Arrived today. Thanks for sharing!

I agree with pretty much everything Anna Quindlen is saying in this small book, especially about being able to travel the world (and times) by reading books. For me one key childhood book was Robinson Crusoe (certainly in a version for children) and another one is the Tripods trilogy by John Christopher. All in all however I had been expecting a bit more from this book.

I have asked noni22 for her adress and will as soon as possible mail the book to her.

Update on Sept.18: I got noni22's address now and will send the book off tomorrow.

Unfortunately the book is still with me, and it currently seems to be better to skip noni22 for now. I'll PM klaradyn for her adress.

Wow, that was really fast! Thanks for sending on, Lisa-B, and for sharing, Cinnamon-Girl. Will read as soon as possible and send on.

A quick, yet thought-provoking, book. It's always fun to read books about reading.

Will send to mrsgaskell next week Monday or Tuesday.

Mailed to mrsgaskell today.

I love receiving books from far away places! Thanks for sending this on klaradyn. Two weeks from South Africa to Canada - that's pretty quick. I love the bookmark that's travelling along with the book - what a great idea Cinnamon-Girl! I hope to start this within the next few days and it shouldn't take me long to read.

It’s always a pleasure to read about someone else’s passion for books, but I would have liked a little more. I liked the book lists! I was surprised by Quindlen's comment that as a girl she felt there were only two choices open to her –to become a housewife or a nun. I'm almost the same age as her and didn't experience that sense of limitation.

This was a very quick read, so it's already in the mail on its way to jessibud.

Thanks again for sharing Cinnamon-Girl!

Arrived here today. It looks like a very quick read so I will begin it right away! Thanks

I have always loved reading Anna Quindlen's writing ever since I first discovered her in her book, Object Lessons. It was a beautiful story. And I am happy to say that I loved this book, too. It is small and simple, but it spoke to me on many levels, evoking nostalgia as well as affirming in the present tense, what I have always known about myself: I love books! (and why I do!)

By way of a journal entry, I think I will just include a few of my favourite quotes. They speak volumes:


- (quoting from Hazel Rochman): "Reading makes immigrants of us all...It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere."

- We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind.

- It is like the rubbing of two sticks together to make a fire, the act of reading, an improbable pedestrian task that leads to heat and light. Perhaps this only becomes clear when one watches a child do it. Dulled to the mystery by years of STOP signs, recipes, form letters, package instructions, suddenly it is self-evident that this is a strange and difficult thing, this making symbols into words, into sentences, into sentiments and scenes and a world imagined in the mind's eye.

- I had no critical judgment at the time; I think children who have critical judgment are as dreadful and unnatural as dogs who wear coats.

- Kafka said "a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us." Perhaps we women are more willing to break the ice. Two things that made this possible most often in many of our lives were intimate friendships and reading.

- "The mere brute pleasure of reading -- the sort of pleasure a cow must have in grazing." G.K. Chesterson

- It means that reading has as many functions as the human body, and that not all of them are cerebral. One is mere enter entertainment, the pleasurable whiling away of time; another is more important, not intellectual but serious just the same. "She had learned something comforting," Roald Dahl wrote in *Matilda* of his ever-reading protagonist, "that we are not alone." And if readers use words and stories as much, or more, to lessen human isolation as to expand human knowledge, is that somehow unworthy; invalid, and unimportant?

- Part of the great wonder of reading is that it has the ability to make human beings feel more connected to one another, which is a great good, if not from a pedagogical point of view, at least from a psychosocial one.

- It's thirty years since man first walked on the moon, and when people sit down to a big old-fashioned supper it is still a plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes, not a capsule and a glass of water. When they buy a Creamsicle, it's three-dimensional, wet and cold and wonderful. That's because people like the things itself. They don't eat mashed potatoes with gravy because they just need to be nourished, but because mashed potatoes and gravy are wonderful in so many ways: the heat, the texture, the silky slide of the gravy over your tongue. And that is the way it is with books. It is not simply that we need information, but that we want to savor it, carry it with us, feel the heft of it under our arm. We like the thing itself.

- Perhaps it is true that at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live vicariously through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world's great nomads, if only in our minds. I travel today in the way I once dreamed of traveling as a child. And the irony is that I don't care for it very much. I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books. This is what I like about traveling: the time on airplanes spent reading, solitary, happy. It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted on ly to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ok, it was a bit difficult to stop, I know!

I am packaging this up and if they plow my street and I can get out of my driveway tomorrow, I will head to the post office to mail it on to Dawni.

Thanks so much for allowing me to be part of this bookring. I suppose I should confess that I have ordered 3 more copies of this book, one to keep and 2 to rabck... ;-)

Received today - thank you so much (and thank you, jessibud, for all the extra lovely little treats)! Looking forward to it.

Lovely little book... thank you for sharing it with me! :)

Off to the next person on the list this week.

Just received this today. I do have a couple other bookrings here right now, but this is such a slim book, I'm sure I'll have no problem reading it soon. But I do want to take time to appreciate it.

I've never read anything by Anna Quindlen before, but I enjoyed this slim volume very much.

Lots of interesting info in here that I, like the other readers before me, agreed with. Found this particularly interesting (on p. 30) - "...Women seem to see reading not only as a solitary activity but as an opporunity for emotional connection, not just to the characters in a novel but to those others who are reading or have read the same novel themselves." Perhaps that's the reason there are many more female BookCrossers than males. Certainly gives one something to think about...

I also agree with her about being able to travel through books (although we also get to travel through our books in a way not even dreamed of by Ms. Quindlen). Definitely adds a bit of excitement to my boring life :)

This book will soon be traveling back home to Cinnamon-Girl. Thanks for sharing! (Mailed 1/28) This is my 4th release in the 2008 Keep Them Moving challenge.

This book has arrived safely back home and I plan to wild release soon so some lucky reader will discover the traveling this book has already done.

Thanks to all who joined the ring and kept the book safe in its travels! I appreciated your comments and am glad you participated.