My usual reading spot is in a Starbucks off of Washington Square Park in Manhattan, which is almost disastrously lame, like traveling to Paris and eating exclusively at McDonald’s or going to London and spending all day in Piccadilly Circus.
I’ve always imagined having a brownstone in Brooklyn with a bay window and a little bench where I could read the day away, arranging the pillows just right and breathing warmly on the window when it begins to fog in the winter. Yet the beautiful thing about books is that it doesn’t matter where we consume them (devour them, really), like lonely, inquisitive carnivores looking for answers and shared experiences. In fact, being surrounded by unbearable dullness — the kind you might find in a fluorescently lit chain coffee shop — only heightens the experience, for the contrast becomes so intense as you fall deep into a story.
When I was very young, I would pretend to know how to read by describing the pictures on the page and skipping over the words as if they were hieroglyphs. By grade six, I got the “reading bug” as my mother would say, and I remember a few particular books from my “young adult”-section self with special fondness:
http://thoughtcatalog.com/cody-delistraty/2013/10/when-you-read-you-are-never-lonely/
Life's a Journey, not a Destination" Aerosmith