Unexpected Intersections

  Today is Unesco's World Book and Copyright Day . I was fortunate enough to start my educational life at a school that encouraged reading, and it was there that my love of story took root.  Mine was a fairly solitary childhood, but with a book, I could enter the worlds of the characters I was reading about, and they became my companions.  I read about dragons, sentient space ships, and the life of a family in political exile.  I read books set in space, fantasy worlds, Siberia, England and New Zealand.  I read books by contemporary authors, and authors long dead.  I read poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction.  Books took me on journeys through time and space and around the world, and all the while offered me a safe place to curl up in when I needed it. Once I was showing our neighbor our apartment (we have the same floor plan and she wanted to see how we were using the space). When we came around the corner to the study, she gasped. "You have so m...