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The Four Books That Informed My Perspective on Love
I’ve always been a reader. When I was little, my mom read aloud to my brother and I every single night, the three of us crowded into my brother’s bed — a bonding ritual that we will undoubtedly pass on to the next generation of bookworms in the family. As I got old enough to devour books by myself, I spent nights staying up as late as I could keep my eyes open, always begging for one more chapter when my mom would turn out my lights, and often switching to a little clip-on reading lamp, or straining my eyes to read in the light from the crack under the door. As an adult, I liked books so much that I now have two degrees in English literature, and in a job market that is more supportive of STEM careers right now, maybe I chose wrong, but hey, at least I know what I like, even if I now have student debt to show for it.
The striations of a cracked paperback spine and the smell of likely-toxic ink on yellowed paper are a site of comfort for me. The magical thing about books is that they serve as proxy night-nurses for young children who long to suckle the teat of knowledge. Too graphic? Okay, I’ll tone down the Victorian Sadboy in me just a bit. In a less flowery epithet, books taught me so much of what I had to learn outside of what my parents and teachers had to say. They taught me about friendship before I had real friends, romance before I ever had a…
