As a child, one of my favorite places in the world was the local library. I loved selecting a stack of books and taking them up to the librarian to be checked out with my own library card — watching her stamp the due date in each and every one and then sliding them back to me to take home. I even dreamed of working at the library, re-shelving books (my little brother actually snagged that job for awhile in high school). I read every single book I could find by Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume and Lois Lowry, then worked my way through the Baby-Sitters Club and all of Christopher Pike’s books, and sometimes started it all from the beginning again. Back in the days before Goodreads and Amazon and everyone on the internet telling you what you should read, all you had was the card catalog and your favorite, trusted authors to read over and over again.

These days, books are still my happy place, my escape, and where I go to discover new ideas and realize just how small and just how large the world really is. Whether novels or non-fiction, the common stories and narratives that everyone carries around within them inspire me to search for connections I didn’t even know existed.

My heart skips a bit every time I think about the whole universe of books out there I haven’t read yet, and I hope this love affair never changes.

What do books mean to you? Is it a love story or a bit of a struggle?

This post is part of Susannah Conway’s April Love, a series of love letters spanning the month of April.