Volume

Isn’t it interesting that we call books volumes. Well, it is to me, anyway. A volume of poetry, for instance. Maybe this is because what’s in a book fills more space than the inch or so between the covers. What’s in a book can fill up the world. It most certainly can fill up a life.

Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, contributed to the passage of laws governing the meat packing industry. Rachel Carson’s, Silent Spring, led to a ban on DDT. But it’s not only the books with the BIG ideas or themes that have impact, it’s the smaller books that seem to find us at just the right time, speaking to us one on one. If I may be so bold as to admit it, I had the worst education. However, I have always read. A lot. I learned not only how to behave, but how I wanted to behave by reading stories about people with the qualities I hoped I might copy.

I read to find out about other people and places, to realize how something innocuous might appear to someone with a guilty conscious or how big a problem an out-of-date railway timetable is to someone waiting to meet the mother-in-law just in on the train. I used to read biographies and autobiographies because I found interest in a well-lived life before realizing most are so biased they make better fiction. Now I read them for that reason.

I’ve always read mysteries and still do, not because I am comforted by a world in which justice prevails, but because I’ve always like to figure things out. I like to know why on Earth so-and-so decided to do such-and-such (or do-in so and so). I will admit I also liked knowing what went on in English country house parties, too, so Agatha Christie was a favorite until I was about twenty-two.

My reading has become more varied as I’ve aged, I try a bit of this or taste of that, stick my fingers in here or there, dabbling in a bit of something new or coming back to something old. I’ve begun rereading a few favorites, pleased to see an entirely different story running alongside the one I remember. Books are always a discovery for me, even if the discovery is realizing how many ways I can improve.

Here’s to the volume of life and the continuing drive to fill it.