Why reading?

So working in publishing and being an ex-bookstore employee - it is no surprise that I am an avid reader. But I often wonder why I chose this profession (or it chose me?), and where this inclination to bury my head in literary la la land comes from. I think there are two main reasons - the first being that language is a tool which we can use to chip away at the meaning of all that is around us. It is a vast and deep sea of options (I mean, do you realise how many species down there we have come up with names for?) that can be playfully and bluntly and artfully and sinuously...(see?) spun into an all but endless array of expressions. Language's craftsman are a bunch of metaphor magicians who conjure up sentences and whip them into stories that take us on a journey to god knows where and depending on the individual's skill will take us on a bumpy journey, a spiritual one or (as Tom Robbins is quite fond of) all the way to Timbuktu.

Which brings me to the second main reason that I love to read - I spend all damn day and night in my own world and I interpret what I see in my own way, so it is refreshing to skip Kate-town for an hour or so a day to take a mental dive into someone else's swimming pool. I love that I can let Isabelle Allende introduce me to people who have drunk so much Amazon juice that their hearts beat to the rhythm of the Incas, or Hunter S. Thompson take me on a rum-fuelled row-boat ride to Cuba to escape a dead pigs head in a toilet (to make me realise that life is not so ordinary for everybody), or Henry David Thoreau take me into the woods for a couple of years. There is an earth full of people out there having adventures and experiences so very unlike my own and I want a ticket on their written express. And I especially want to go wherever the hell Kilgor Trout or Pan and Alobar wish to take me.