Welcome Readers

I hope this blog space will be a stimulating  but courteous place to dialogue about the way we read to live and live to read. I'm using "read" here as a shorthand for a process that all book "belovers" will understand: a heart and mind-filled dialogue with another soul, living or dead, through his or her words. It amazes me to realize that through this medium, if we are active readers, we can "speak" with people we can never meet, people separated from us not only by continents but by centuries,  or longer! Of course, even when we read the words of a living writer, we are in a different kind of conversation than we could ever have if that person were sitting at our dinner table. The conversation between a reader and a writer is uniquely intimate -- literally, as readers we are "mind readers"-- yet also formal, as we accept these words come to us from rituals of convention: genre, grammar and usage, literary devices, to name some.

 If we think of a blog as a book-in-progress, I hope we will put the same care into our words here -- not in a literary sense, perhaps, but in the spirit of honest communication that invites considering new perspectives, rather than pursuing some sort of personal victory.

Some of you may recognize my borrowing of a word from one of my favorite writers, Marcus Borg, who describes faith as a matter not of believing, but of beloving: it does not mean accepting any doctrine in defiance of one's reason, it means giving one's heart and soul to the truth of what we value. Though he was speaking of a way of looking at Christianity, one that has led me to seriously explore my own spirituality, I am using his word to describe how I feel about books. If you're reading this, maybe you feel the same way as I do: books are a metaphor for an orientation to the challenges of life, a path of openness to new ideas, new people, our common humanity, and how we can work together through dialogue to take the kinds of actions that will make our common lives richer, more just, fair, peaceful, loving and beautiful. Books shape the way we think and feel, what we can imagine, and that in turn shapes what we do and say.

Books have helped me envision new possibilities in the darkest of times; they have helped me explore tough questions; they have helped me to understand others; they have taken me around the world and into space. With books I'm never bored or alone, and bringing books to people (as a mother, as a writer, as a teacher) has been a joyful work of my life. And this is my first blog. Write and start a conversation about a book and the value it's had for you!