100 Words - Kj Swanson on Reading

Welcome to our first installment of 100 Words! Hopefully I’ll be posting a couple a week as they come in. So, without further ado, I give you Kj Swanson on “Reading.”

As a kid, I had trouble believing that people in the past were alive like me. I wanted to see for myself that they were real.  I wanted a time machine. Still do. That’s probably why I read centuries-old fiction. I’m looking for the daily details and resonant feelings to prove that those whose stories preceded my own had lives real as mine.  I read to meet the part of the human race that left before I got here.  And I read today’s writers, knowing it’s communication with the future. I can’t travel through time, but reading gets me close.

Kj Swanson is a grad student looking for someone to pay her to read books and watch movies for a living. Check out her witty, pithy, and heartfelt blog often!