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Read A Book

When people ask me what I do in my spare time, one of my answers is almost always “reading.”  Now, I know that does not sound like the most exciting answer.  It may not seem thrilling or especially active.  To me, though, reading is just as exciting as almost any other hobby.  For me, reading is a source of memories, a reminder of a part of my life.

I vividly recall, on sunny days, sitting on a blanket in my front yard, a book in my hands.  The sun at my back, I practically inhaled the stories.  On summer road trips, I whiled away the trip by reading.  It was not unusual for me to finish a book over the course of a trip.

When I had read all of the books I had, we would go to the library to find new options.  Some of my most constant childhood memories involve trips to the library.  During the summer, especially, my mother would take my brothers and me to the library.  We would walk through the doors and split up, my brothers and I heading in one direction, towards the children’s section, while my mother went in the other direction, to the novels and biographies, her favorites.  After a long time spent wandering the aisles, we would come back together, each of us with a stack of books in our hands.

To this day, when I am looking for something to do, I invariably will grab a book, even if it is one that I have read many times over.  I will pick it up again and read it as if it were brand new.  I never tire of scanning the pages, revisiting favorite stories and discovering new details.

As my friends have started having kids, my go-to gift for them has not been a toy or something from a registry.  It has been books.  Books I read as a child.  Books my friends read as children.  I want them to get the same enjoyment from reading that I got.  What better way to do that than by giving them a book.

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