Professor Kinohi Nishikawa, an assistant professor in the English Department here at Princeton (specializing in African-American culture and modern print culture), gave a talk to FSI students this past Wednesday about books.

Yes, books.

More specifically, he discussed the intersection of book design with ethnicity and race, centering the discussion on Claude McKay and Toni Morrison. Some of the book designs we discussed are featured below.

However, as interesting as his talk with us was, this isn’t what I'm here to talk about today.

Something Professor Nishikawa said during his talk struck me in all the right ways.

He said, “Books are a sensual experience.”

I wish I had heard this statement three years ago before I found myself pages-thick into John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, loathingly turning pages because it was assigned reading�— and any one of my teachers from high school can attest, I hate assigned reading. I wish I had heard this before I enrolled in Advanced Placement classes and reading became a chore instead of the wondrous experience it had been for me when I was growing up. I wish I had heard this before I started at Princeton and enrolled in a class with a 25-book reading list, viewing it as “something to be done” instead of an opportunity to expand my world knowledge.

Long story short, I wish that my academic ventures hadn’t ruined the idea of reading books “just for fun”. That’s not to say I find anything wrong with required readings, because if it wasn’t for A.P. Literature and Composition, I never would have experienced Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, finding myself in Francie Nolan, learning to write the lies I wanted to tell into short stories. I would never have spent my time with Sandra Cisnero’s A House Grows on Mango Street, or Toni Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye, and realized that there are alternate experiences, flavored by race/ethnicity, gender, and where we live. Even among those differences, there were exciting similarities and this reminded me of how, in the end, we are all human.

In a time when anxiety about the future tinged every decision I made, I needed to know that everything was more than okay, and required reading sometimes did that for me.

So, no, required readings are definitely not evil and meant to be avoided at all costs— I know that now.

However, what I am saying is that I let myself fall into an attitude of believing that required readings were meant to be taken reluctantly. I seem to have lost the concept of “reading for fun”— to me, reading is not a “sensual” experience anymore but rather a dead, flat one. I have been taught and pushed to read 500-page books in the span of a week all while analyzing the themes and motifs at play and how the author executes them through their style, rather than paying attention to what I feel in my heart when I read it, and how the author’s choice of words affect me.

Maybe it is possible to do both of these, but I know I haven’t learned yet. Before my junior year of high school, relaxation to me was cracking open a new book and slipping into the story in front of me. Now, I lay in bed with the windows cracked during my summer here at Princeton, staring at the small pile of books I decided to tote along back in May. I thought, perhaps optimistically, “Yes! Now I’ll have free time this summer! I can finally read what I want to!”

Guess what? I am so burnt out on reading and consuming information, I haven’t really opened any of them for two months, except for a half-assed attempt at starting a book of poetry I bought at the beginning of the summer. I was barely able to make it past the front cover, with the title that defied the use of capital letters, before I promptly put it back in its place to collect dust with the others. I also made it about ¾ of the way through Stephen King’s The Stand, but I still couldn’t even finish that, although it’s one of my favorite novels.

This is my long-winded way of saying that I have fallen out of love with my books and with reading.

So I’m writing this today for those that might also have lost their love for reading, for those who might not be able to read as much as they would like to— even those who perhaps never really “liked” reading in the first place, but took the chore in stride. Remember—

“Books are a sensual experience.”

When I was younger, my bookshelves were packed full of the Babysitter’s club series, Magic Tree House, and Junie B. Jones— books I never quite mustered the strength to throw away— peppered with the mark of a growing bookworm starstruck by the likes of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Growing up low-income with a single parent meant I didn’t get many ‘extra’ things, so every family member bought me books for every holiday, and I loved them. We moved nineteen times before I was fifteen, and somehow I retained most, if not all, of the books I had received over the years. There was, of course, the occasional book or books left behind, sitting in the corner of whichever bedroom I had inhabited, and I always knew which ones I was missing when it was time to settle into whatever new place I had. I lamented the loss of them as if I had lost one of my limbs. My family never understood, but it was like phantom pains for me.

“Books are a sensual experience.”

I was one of those stereotypical kids who stayed up past my bedtime with a flashlight and my book, devouring every word from every page. It was easy to slip into another time and another storyline that I didn’t belong to. I think most kids want to believe that other lives are better than theirs. We want to live an exciting life, one where wizards slip among Muggles unnoticed and cars fly in the middle of the day, or perhaps one where Incredibly Deadly Vipers are used by men with mystical eye tattoos to leverage against orphans with incredible knowledge.

I used to carry thick books with me wherever I went so that I always had something to do. As I got a little older and social anxiety took a hold of me, books became my safety blanket. When my heart would start racing and I wanted to recede into my shell, I became aware that I was gripping my novel-of-the-week so tightly that the pages would fan out underneath my fingertips, a crisp paper’s edge grounding me in the present and giving me strength to complete whatever the task at hand was. My fingers would turn bloodless white, but I would finish what needed to be done. My books gave me the strength to do that.

“Books are a sensual experience.”

The first time I went to an antique bookstore, it was a sensual experience. The smell of years gone by wafting throughout the store was only compounded when one would open any of the books on the shelves. To run one’s fingers across the cover of a hardback book with details in gold leaf is to touch God, or what it must feel like. To read the work of some largely bygone author, to read the most intimate details of their life— or whatever they thought was important enough to encapsulate in between two covers— is a practice in time travel.

I remember a ten-year-old me lovingly stroking the spine of my brand-new, just-released Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and I felt a shudder run down my spine, too. I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted desperately to someday see my name stacked in 75-point Baskerville font, and I was only reminded of that desire when I heard Professor Nishikawa talk. I’ve been telling everyone that would hear it for years that I want to be a writer, but the goal became more and more hypothetical as the distance grew between myself and books, the reason why I decided to write. I loved books then, and not just the words inside them, but the physical existence of books. They were my home, and we all know what happens when we stay at home for too long— we get bored.

I want to go back home.

Books are a sensual experience, and I’m ready to feel that again.