I’m grateful, today and everyday, for the breathtaking power of books. I’m grateful for the magic that words weave, for the dizziness of being swept away, and for the suspension in so many realms of existence one after the other, even if ephemerally, that books make possible while one is still moored to reality.

I’m grateful for the beauty, oh the impossible beauty, in the teeming crevices of language, fashioned by a Flaubert or a Van Booy. I’m grateful for the velvety prettiness that can almost be touched which characterizes their work. Zusak and Krauss also come to mind, their words being so delicious that you can almost taste them in your mouth, and I’m grateful for the part they played in furthering my love for the English language. I used to think during the snobbish years of my teenage that beauty of language was a thing of the past, confined to the pages of classics in literature. I’m grateful for having been led to the works of contemporary writers who aren’t all that different (though they will never truly match up to Flaubert, Hardy, Gaskell, Austen, all the Brontë sisters, Hugo, and so many others that were the dearest of companions during the happiest years of my life).

I’m grateful for the hurricane of emotions that my heart has expanded to contain. Victor Hugo comes to mind. I’m grateful for all the tears, the tears of joy and the tears from being moved so much it physically hurt. I’m grateful for the knots in my chest that first initiated me to the world of romance. I’m still the little girl who wants to live and love like the people in the Brontë sisters’ and Jane Austen’s works. I long to have been born in the era they wrote about, (minus the Victorian patriarchy). I’m grateful for the hollowness in the pit of my stomach (and sometimes, actually rarely, the sense of being light, free, buoyant) that initiated me to the works of existentialists. There’s a long way to go in my exploration there, but I’m grateful for the solidarity I have already experienced with regards to my “sickness of living”, reading Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Camu, Kundera, and Yalom.

I’m grateful for the wisps of dreams that float on my pillow when I sleep, dreams crafted from the stories of courage, hope and fortitude that women and men that came long before me lived. I’m grateful for the seeds sown in my mind by the futuristic work of Atwood and others. I’m grateful for being allowed to live a thousand childhoods through the works of Montgomery and Burnette. I have no grand ambitions; I simply desire to be forever immersed in these stories, these lives.

I’m grateful for the chance to soak in so much knowledge, to be granted an ear to the inner workings of the greatest minds in history, without having deserved any of it! I feel small when I am at the altar of learning, learning about magnificent discoveries and feats of resistance and strength, and I’m grateful for the daily reminders to be more humble, more perseverant. I’m particularly grateful for all feminist scholarship that I have been drinking in since the last couple of years. They are good for my hungry, tired soul, even when they make me angrier or more melancholic. They are the reason I feel hopeful for humanity; they are the reason I might feel tired but will never feel cynical. I cherish the experiences of awe and wonder that course through my veins when I read feminist writings; I’m grateful for the inspiration.

I’m grateful for all the stories that have transported me thousands of years back, and that have made living so joyful! I’m grateful for the letters poets wrote to their muses and lovers. I’m grateful for the unadulterated happiness, the difficult to describe painfully beautiful sadness. I’m grateful for words, books, writers, and everyone in my formative years who encouraged pleasure reading (remembering you ‘Library Ma’am’). It’s a great relief to know that in whatever remains of my life, I will always have books.