Sometimes they would sit in the parlor together, both reading – in entirely separate worlds, to be sure, but joined somehow. When this happened, other people in the family couldn't bring themselves to disturb them. All that could be heard in the parlor was the sound of pages, turning.

He started to look at me in a manner I recognized: it was the way I looked at a new book, one I had never read before, one that surprised me with all it had to say.

I knew I must do all as I was told, yet something burned inside me, a seed of defiance that must have derived from a long-ago ancestor. Perhaps my mind was inflamed from the books I had read and the worlds I had imagined.

Books may well be the only true magic.

Shelby watched the books burn. She wonders if words are pouring down on other people's houses,sad words, like beast and mourn and sorrow and mother.

Because we were Russian, sadness came naturally to us. But so did reading. In my family, a book was a life raft.

She kept a stack of books near the tub so she could read in the bath, even though the edges of the pages turned moldy. She read on trains and on buses, which often made her late as she was forever missing her stop.

Perhaps I was drawn to stories in which people found their true desires because I was a stranger to myself.