The library is a poor bibliophile’s best friend. Ever since I went through Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University, I’ve come to appreciate the utter free-ness of my local library (and the utopian marvel of interlibrary loans). I’ve placed so many holds, in fact, that I’ve memorized my lengthy, cryptic library card number. At present there is a stack of four books by my bed that were checked out from that public haven of enlightenment—three of them being read simultaneously—simply because there can be.

I didn’t always enjoy reading. I read the odd book growing up, and remember Charles Dickens’ novels particularly affecting me. But for all my nerdy homeschooledness, I just wasn’t one of those kids always curled up in a chair with nose buried (my nerddom manifested itself in far more chilling ways). I read a few of the books assigned in high school—claiming Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country as my all-time favorite upon finishing it—but I resented the obligation to read for a teacher, and denied any temptation to read for my own pleasure.

My explanation for this teenage distaste for reading was that the activity sucked me into a time-altering vortex, and I loathed the feeling of losing two hours in another world only to be rewarded with the groggy stumble out of an escapist stupor back into reality. (It was and is the same reason I hate seeing films at the theater in the afternoon; entering the cinema during daylight and exiting under nightfall is uncomfortably disorienting for me.)

I realize millions of people read for just the reason I avoided it: to escape reality for a few adventure-filled hours, forgetting themselves in the process.

During my college years, taking Great Books classes with long syllabi of compulsory reading, I slowly and finally began to acquire a taste for reading. You could argue that the taste was already there (as my childhood enjoyment of David Copperfield and Cry, The Beloved Country attest), but I finally developed an appetite for the literary cuisine, and an insatiable one at that. Homer, Voltaire, Socrates, Augustine, Kierkegaard, Dante, Austen, Dostoevsky. In two years I took a whirlwind trip through literature history, and another hopeless bibliophile was born.

What’s interesting is, it wasn’t as though my early excuses for avoiding books were suddenly eclipsed in my newfound love of escapism. To this day I prefer non-fiction to anything like “escapist” literature, and I only enjoy the occasional fiction novel.

I recently self-analyzed, and came to the conclusion that I do not read in order to escape. It seems that I read to see myself and my life in perspective. My favorite kind of books, usually involving some kind of overriding spiritual idealism, don’t distract me from my troubles; they reveal my troubles as being universal and, often, trivial.

I enjoy reading because it is one of the best tools I know of to recalibrate my mind and heart, those two most valuable internal organs. When I read a good book (by my definition), it helps me to sort things out. It often lifts unnecessarily heavy burdens I’m carrying and puts a new spring in my step (proverbially, of course). The fiction I enjoy has something of the same effect; rather than temporarily distracting me from my life, it provides some helpful commentary on it.

I don’t claim any superiority in my particular love of reading (and perhaps it’s not all that unusual). It’s only my explanation for why I went from avoiding books to staying up too late every night reading stacks of them.