WHY I READ

I know what I'll do when I get home from work tonight: I'll lie in bed reading The Family Moskat by Isaac Bashevis Singer. With my wife two hours away in St. Louis, I'm alone. When I'm alone, I find comfort in fiction. And Singer is one of my favorites.

I'll be transported to the Jewish neighborhoods of turn-of-the-century Warsaw, smell the cooking, see the street peddlers and hear the characters arguing about religion and politics. Singer shows me the world of my grandparents.

I can't afford to travel much. I've never been overseas. But by reading I've been transported to foreign places and other times. The novelist Chinua Achebe has shown me the problems Nigerians have dealing with their colonial past. B. Traven, Naguib Mahfouz and Salman Rushdie have done the same for me with Mexico, Egypt and India. Emil Zola has shown me life in 19th century French mining towns, among the poor of Paris, on the railroad, and shown me the reality of the Franco-Prussian War.

Fiction doesn't always take me overseas. When I read E.L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, I was in New York during the Depression, going down some of the same streets my parents knew at that time. When I read Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, I saw a sensitive girl and her not-so-sensitive friends growing up in Toronto in the 1940s and 1950s growing up to be like some people I might run into.

Fiction gets me inside people's heads. I might not get there otherwise.

I also take pleasure from newspapers. Reading this newspaper thoroughly, I usually find at least one gem each issue buried in the wire copy -- a story about a dadaist party in the Nevada desert or about a study showing that urban trees reduce crime.

I never miss Dear Abby. Sometimes I think Abby and her twin sister are the best ways to know what is really happening in this country.

And of course, your local newspaper is the best way to know what's happening in town and find out the previous evening's baseball scores.

I read so much I often don't even notice I'm doing it. Do I always enjoy it? Of course not. Does anyone enjoy every movie or television show they watch? Or conversation they have? But if I don't like reading something, I can just put it down and pick up something else.