I too read in bed. In the long succession
of beds in which I spent the nights of my childhood, in strange hotel rooms
where the lights of passing cars swept eerily across the ceiling, in houses
whose smells and sounds were unfamiliar to me, in summer cottages sticky with
sea spray or where the mountain air was so dry that a steaming basin of
eucalyptus water was placed by my side to help me breathe, the combination of
bed and book granted me a sort of home which I knew I could go back to, night
after night, under whichever skies.
No one would call out and ask me to do this
or that; my body needed nothing, immobile under the sheets. What took place,
took place in the book, and I was the story’s teller. Life happened because I
turned the pages. I don’t think I can remember a greater comprehensive joy than that of coming to the few last pages and
setting the book down, so that the end would not take place until at least
tomorrow, and sinking back into my pillow with the sense of having actually
stopped time.
Quotation from: A History of Reading by Aberto Manguel, London, Penguin, 2014.
