Sometimes you read something so profoundly affecting, you want to grab your bull horn. Not having a cosmic bull horn, I give you, deep, dark, droll reader, some thoughts on Sherman Alexie’s powerful education essay “Superman and Me.”

My reading origin story begins in Title I (translate: “girl’s-not-getting-it” or IEP before such things were a thing). We under performers sat in small semi-circles with an aide and received extra reading help while the other kids…what? Read books? Discussed the environment? I don’t know. I remember my dad, my hero, reading Dick and Jane books with me, and I remember hating them with a white-hot hatred. They were so dumb. I basically languished in elementary school until the sixth grade when best-teacher-ever Mr. Stoisits devoted a portion of each week to pleasure reading. He stocked his classroom full of actual, no kidding, honest-to-goodness exciting books of every genre, and he let us choose.

Agency.

It was the first time I enjoyed a book. I went through a magical door. And once I knew that door existed, I kept coming back. Sometimes the door was locked. Some books didn’t thrill me at first. Some, okay, many confused me, but I wanted to rekindle that same delight of my first book-loving experience, so I kept at it. Eventually I met a book series I adored so much that I did not want it to end, ever. The words The end felt like a death. How could words on a page evoke such thick and horrible and wonderful and terrible emotions? How could words be more important than sleep?

I wrote a promise to myself. I vowed I would one day make people love characters the way I loved these. I remember writing it out like I was contracting with God. I may have written it on the inside cover. The book is lost, but my promise is not.

Sherman Alexie considers books as more than doors. They are life rafts and ramparts and square meals. They are the solution to everything. In a way I agree with him. The very best book, the Bible carried me to peace. Books are a way into minds we wouldn’t dare plumb, a way into minds we could care less about, but ought to. They are the only ancient boundary line of the human experience.

A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies… The man who never reads lives only one. – George R.R. Martin