::: before the to-do lists, there were library cards
you didn’t stop loving books… life just got loud
You used to know exactly what you were reading next. Somewhere between work, the carpool line and after-school , you stopped disappearing into books. Let’s find our way back.
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When I was a little girl, I knew exactly where I was headed every Saturday morning.
The public library first. My mother would drop me near the Hardy Boys shelf, and I would settle in like I belonged to that row of books and they belonged to me. I knew every spine by heart. I could tell you which ones I’d read and which ones were still waiting, patient and certain, as if they understood I would get to them eventually.
There was something almost sacred about standing in front of all those books with the whole morning stretching out ahead of you and absolutely no reason to rush. No clock pressing in. No one needing anything. Just the quiet, steady promise of story.
After the library, we’d stop at the grocery store. I’d spend my allowance on Archie comic books and use every last cent without regret.
Then we’d ride home in our pink Cadillac. To a girl who loved stories, it felt like the height of glamour. As soon as we finished unloading groceries, I’d carry my stack out to the pecan tree and read until supper.
That was my whole plan every Saturday.
::: the summers we were allowed to disappear
Reading in childhood is its own freedom.
Nobody is making you take notes. Nobody is asking what themes you identified or whether the narrative arc satisfied you. You open a book and leave your life for a while. That’s not only allowed, it’s the point.
Summer made it even better. No bells. No stopping points. No reason to put the book down unless you wanted to.
You could read the same book twice in a week if you wanted to, or start three new ones and abandon them all for the one that finally grabbed you by the collar and refused to let go.
Some of us had bookmobiles — those improbable, beautiful library trucks that arrived like grace in neighborhoods and parking lots like some kind of literary miracle. If you grew up anywhere near one, you remember the way it smelled inside. Paper and dust and something almost like magic. Something you’ve never quite found again.
And then there was the personal pan pizza.
If you were a certain age in a certain era, you know EXACTLY what I mean. 😁
Pizza Hut’s BOOK IT! program launched in 1985: read a certain number of books, earn a free personal pan pizza. I watched it work on kids year after year when I became a literacy specialist.
The pizza was never really the point.
What children wanted was to be seen for what they’d done, to have someone notice that they’d gone somewhere and come back changed.
Because that’s what reading does. It takes you somewhere and you don’t come back the same.
::: how life quietly takes your reading life away
It doesn’t happen all at once. That’s what makes it so easy to miss.
You don’t wake up one morning and decide to stop reading. Life simply fills the space.
A new baby, a new job, a classroom full of children who need you. Dinner to make and papers to grade and a to-do list that somehow multiplies overnight.
The book on your nightstand moves from the pillow to the end table to the shelf, and one day you notice you can’t remember the last time you finished one.
I spent years teaching children to love books. I helped them find the ones that fit. I celebrated their reading milestones. I believed in what books could do for a life.
And somewhere in the middle of all that, between the teaching and the mothering and the keeping of everyone else’s world running, I stopped reading.
It is a quiet loss, the kind you don’t grieve because you’re too busy to notice it’s gone.
::: coming back to books in the second half
Retirement hands you back your time and then waits, almost politely, to see what you’ll do with it.
For a while I didn’t know.
The quiet felt unfamiliar.
This year I went back to the Hardy Boys with my grandchildren. The same series that first captured me as a girl. I sat on the front porch with one and remembered, within a few pages, exactly what I had been missing.
Writing the marginalia column here at ::: sixth generation has brought me back to the literary world in a way I didn’t expect. It has given me a reason to linger over sentences, to notice what moves me, to write down the lines that refuse to let me go.
To pay attention again.
The Bible has done that for me more times than I can count. More than once, I’ve opened to a psalm at two in the morning and felt, with some relief, that someone had already said what I couldn’t.
Books are still the best escape route I know. They don’t help you avoid your life. They help you understand it. You come back from a good story slightly different than you left.
That hasn’t changed since I was a girl under the pecan tree with a Hardy Boys mystery and the whole afternoon ahead of me.
::: you are still that reader
For the women who remember what it felt like to read three books in a week but now can’t remember the last time they finished one: you didn’t lose your love of reading. Life just buried it under everything else for a while.
Summer is a great time to dig that love back out. Not because you have to earn the rest. Not because you’ve checked everything off the list. But because you are allowed to return to something that once made you feel fully alive.
Because there’s still a girl somewhere inside you who knows where she wants to be on a Saturday morning, and she hasn’t forgotten the smell of library books or the pure pleasure of a story that makes the whole world go quiet.
She isn’t gone.
Find her a book.
Sit somewhere you love.
Let the afternoon do what afternoons were made to do.
There’s no pizza this time.
But there is this: a good book, a quiet hour, and the steady, surprising recognition of yourself. The version of you who reads, who lingers, who remembers how to disappear and come back changed.
And that’s more than enough.
What’s the book that made you a reader? Or the one you’ve been meaning to get back to? Tell me in the comments. I’d love to know!
If you’re new here, welcome home. Pull up a chair. The coffee’s always on.
