On Magic and Reading
I'm back!
Every December, I get the urge to read a cozy book and every year I fail. The last few years, I’ve had a yearning to read Anna Karenina. I don’t know where I got the idea that it’s a Christmassy book, but this morning, I actually started it (I don’t want to brag but I am on page 8). I am not sure if I’ll get through it, but I want to make time to read it every day. I want to make time to be cozy with a warm drink and try to read 50 pages in a single sitting, something I would do a lot as a younger reader.
What happens to the children that inhale books as adults? Well, a lot of us become writers and sometimes we get lost in what we have to write and what we should read that we lose some of the joy. At least, that is my case.
As a child, I watched the movie, The Pagemaster, starring Macaulay Culkin and it made me want to read every book in the world. For those of you who haven’t watch this often-forgotten Macaulay Culkin movie, it is about a boy who finds refuge in a library during a storm, meets the librarian played by Christopher Lloyd, and goes on a series of animated adventures based on classic literary genres. The first time I watched this, I desperately wanted to go in adventures, too.
At the time, however, I was still in a small town in Veracruz and we had little access to books outside of the textbooks at school and the bible. At some point I must have told my mom about my desire to read because she got me a book, a biography of Simón Bolivar. A non-fiction book about a revolutionary wasn’t exactly the adventure I yearned for, so when we immigrated to New York and moved to a town that felt straight out of The Pagemaster, Matilda, and Jumanji, it felt like a dream come true. My school library, to this day, brings the coziest of memories. We literally had a librarian that wore a tall wizards hat while she read our class stories.
Image: Suffern, New York
At first, I read the few bilingual books they had in stock, but soon, I began to branch out. I read my way through Scholastic’s Dear America series and my very first murder mystery novel The Dollhouse Murders, by Betty Ren Wright. And I even got to meet my very first author, Amy Hest. I still have a signed copy of her book, The Great Green Notebook of Katie Roberts. The library was a magical place (protect the libraries!) because of all of the stories it housed. It still blows my mind that my children’s book, Dear Abuelo, is in libraries now. If I could go back to the US for 1 minute, I’d go to a library just to see my book on the shelf.
But over the years, so much of the magic of reading disappeared for me. As a child, I filled my free time with reading, and these days, I have to make free time. Even when I have some, I am so tired that it feels so much easier to scroll on my phone or rewatch a movie I’ve watched dozens of time than to pick up a book and read. But I really want to try because my life feels so boring and so adult. So full of responsibility and anxiety and worries. But I want to bring more whimsy into my life. I want to remember what magic feels like and books still feel like the most magical thing. I want to be a reader again and not a writer that reads. When I become a mother, I set out to not be a mom that sacrified all of her time and energy for her chid, but I ended up there anyway. I have been trying to make more time for myself, but I keep making lists of things of I should be doing or should want to do instead of what I actually want to do.
But lately, some things in life came together and I managed to scrunch up a manageable, and more inporantly, enjoyable morning routine that revolves around an outdoor walk. I have a treadmill at home, but there is truly nothing like fresh air. I forgot how nice fresh it is to get fresh air. It funny how litte things like fresh air make you feel like life is worth living and also remind you that you, in fact, deserve joy in your life. And one thing I want actually want that isn’t a need or a should is to do is to experience things that feel magical. It feels like a high expectation, but I am finally not too depressed to talk myself out of thinking that it is a worthy pursuit. A pursuit that feel oddly apt during the holiday season. Maybe reading Anna Karenina won’t fix me, maybe I picked the wrong book to start, but maybe… it will (?). The point is to try and I will report back!