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I remember sitting in the folds of a huge maple tree, just outside my house. My elbows were propped up on its roots and I was reading. After a long stretch of reading, I got up to go play with my friends, only to see that my elbows were bruised from propping them on the bark for too long. Such a world the book had created for me that I forgot to feel any kind of pain.
That kind of pulling someone into a world entirely different than their own is the power that books have held over me for the longest time.
Literature started out in phases for me. At first, intimidating, then an acquaintance and finally a companion. I started out by tiptoeing around the dusty school library in the summer holidays where I would take 7 books at once and read them all within two weeks. As a life-changing phenomenon, literature was so dynamic that I did not understand how it took root in my unconscious and slowly changed my perspective about the world. It did that to my mind in so many ways that I had to sit and think for three days about the ways that it did that in. A major advantage for me was to travel to other worlds. That was an absolute pleasure for a 10-year-old living in a small town with nothing to access other than her imagination. And literature was a major catalyst in that.
