Tag Archives: reading

The afternoon book hour


Magic BookBooks taught me that anything was possible. I have my mother to thank. She drove us to the library every couple of weeks to check out our allotment of books and each afternoon we were sent to our bedrooms to read

. In hindsight, our reading time allowed her the calm and quiet house required to feed her passion. I remember novels stacked on her bedside table, a different one migrating to the top of the pile every few days. As a five year old I couldn’t imagine reading such thick books with hundreds of pages. Where were the pictures? It took the passage of time to appreciate the extraordinary power that books held between their covers. Characters that popped out of a page and into the imagination, worlds near, far and beyond the stars. I miss those quiet, carefree midday hours propped up on my bed with the tick-tock of our old grandfather clock down the hall and the smell of the fresh ink stamp in my book from the public library.