A good book can spark a longing for conversation—with a friend, a coworker, a book club, the person who you couldn’t stop thinking of while flipping the pages.
A good book can spark a longing to be alone, to spend time with just yourself and these words.
A good book can convince you to underline its lines and scribble down its best quotes.
A good book can deprive you of a good night’s sleep, luring you to read, read, read instead of turning out the light.
A good book can lull you into dreamland, the rhythm of the language easing your mind into rest.
A good book can prompt you to remember how much you love the ways this writer shapes words into sentences and stories.
A good book can fill you with an odd evangelistic urge to press its pages into someone else’s hands.
A good book can induce skepticism of mediocre books and disdain for horrible books.
A good book can transform your mind into a hive of ideas.
A good book can introduce you to new friends, in fictional and real worlds.
A good book can help you see something familiar in a strange new way.
A good book can help you see something new in an old, familiar way.
A good book can make you scurry away with a new word for your midden of verbal treasures: febrile (adjective), piano (noun as verb), jejune (adjective), even—yes—midden (noun).
A good book can inspire frustration at your past self, who owned this copy for years without opening it once.
A good book can create a spark of delight when you see it on your bookshelf days, months, years later: a physical sign of a beloved experience.
A good book can release you from the prison of your current pains.
A good book can plunge you into the sufferings you might otherwise have ignored.
A good book can make you fond of the stranger you spot reading it in public.
A good book can recall the place where you first read it: a hotel room in Spain, the porch of your old apartment, on a picnic blanket before a date, the backseat of the family van.
A good book can shape your desire to visit a place or person: the kitchen, the city of Tokyo, a memorial statue, the Pope, your grandfather.
A good book can turn you into a font of fun facts about the most obscure subjects.
A good book can share the griefs you struggle to describe.
A good book can embody the stories you have lived but have rarely seen written.
A good book can prod you into the uncomfortable realization that you need to grow.
A good book can make you reluctant to spend time with something outside of its world.
A good book can make you long for the next one.
A good book can expand your world and show you different colors, cultures, and histories.
A good book can tighten your world and show you the roots of a tree or the tears of a child.
A good book can make you want to write, even just to feel language thrumming through your mind like that again.
Photo credit Mark Cruzat on Pexels
Courtney Zonnefeld graduated in 2018 with a degree in writing. She currently lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she works for Eerdmans Books for Young Readers. In her free time, she enjoys reading, baking, and saving up for more herb plants. You can usually find her wandering a farmer’s market, hunting for vintage books, or browsing the tea selection in coffee shops.
