Joy of Reading ~ Tolstoy and the Purple Chair

from Tolstoy and the Purple Chair: My Year of Magical Reading by Nina Sankovitch

People share books they love.  They want to spread to friends and family the goodness that they felt when reading the book or the ideas they found in the pages.  In sharing a loved book, a reader is trying to share the same excitement, pleasure, chills, and thrills of reading that they themselves experienced.  Why else share?  Sharing a love of books and of one particular book is a good thing.  But it is also a tricky maneuver....  The giver of the book is not exactly ripping open her soul for a free look, but when she hands over the book with the comment that it is one of her favorites, such an admission is very close to the baring of the soul.  We are what we love to read, and when we admit to loving a book, we admit that the book represents some aspects of ourselves truly, whether it is that we are suckers for romance or pining for adventure or secretly fascinated by crime.