My Passion for Literature Anonymous

I stood on my tiptoes, clapping furiously, my mouth open in a joyous scream. The White Sox, my favorite baseball team, had won a critical game while I was in the audience. As the furor of victorious shouts died down, I noticed my friends’ faces; like mine, they were filled with glee. “How lucky I am,” I thought, “to be at this winning game with my best friends!” Almost without thinking, I murmured, “Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it,” a line from James Lowell’s poem, “And what is so rare as a day in June?” Lowell’s words described my mood perfectly, even better than I could have done. This scholar-poet of the nineteenth century felt exactly about a day in June as I did about a Sox game.

That’s what I’ve always loved about literature: realizing that other men and women, living in radically different times and circumstances than my own, have felt as I do. I was six years old when I slowly plowed through my first “real” book, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House in the Big Woods. I read about Laura’s games and fights with her sister, her chores, and her occasional confusion with the world of adults. I saw myself in Laura, who lived more than a century ago. I fell in love with books then and there, and my passion has...