“Reading in old age is doing for me what it has always done — it frees me from the closet of my own mind. Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person’s understanding; reading everything else, I am traveling — I am traveling in a way that I still can: new sights, new experiences. I am reminded sometimes of the intensity of childhood reading, that absolute absorption when the very ability to read was a heady new gain, the gateway to a different place, to a parallel universe you hadn’t known was there. The one entirely benign mind-altering drug…”
From Penelope Lively’s memoir, “Dancing Fish and Ammonites.”
Temples of reading, libraries lost in Los Angeles:
