For as long as I can remember, there has been a different world underlying my own. Beneath my daily life, beneath school and work and friends and experiences, there simmers a delectable, extraordinary world: the world of books. Saying that books are an important part of my life is a ridiculous understatement.

In elementary school, the day when the teacher handed out the new Scholastic catalogs was almost as good as Christmas. The book fairs held in the library were enough to keep me awake with anticipation for a whole week beforehand. When I got to high school, my collection of books overflowed from shelves and boxes, and by the time I graduated, books could basically be found on any surface in my house. Walking across my room, you are likely to trip over James Joyce or, more likely, my enormous copy of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, featuring three different editions of the poem. In order to find any misplaced object, you must first move towers of books, shuffling through layers of Jeannette Winterson and Virginia Woolf.

With this kind of life-long book obsession, I basically had no choice other than to become an English major once I got to college. I was astonished by the fact that for four years I could just read books, and then somebody would hand me a diploma for it. It seemed almost too easy. After one too many people asked what the hell I was going to do with an English major, I briefly rebelled and switched to Journalism – but soon came fleeing back to English like a runaway child coming home to old pages and spidery words.

I soon discovered, though, something that I had not considered before – a world in which some books are acceptable, belonging to the self-satisfied category of Serious Literature, while others are guilty pleasures, taboo in the classroom but okay to read in the dark corners of summer vacation. If you want to be taken seriously, you can't admit your love for teen fantasy novels or Pride and Prejudice spin-offs to your English professors. Now, I'm not saying that everybody should start writing their dissertations on Harry Potter, but can't we all just like what kind of books we like without being looked down upon? I've always suspected that those who are married to the classics must be conducting adulterous love affairs with fantasy or sci-fi. Personally, I prefer to keep everything out in the open.

My bookshelves are overflowing with odd juxtapositions. Most of Thoreau's works (including two copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers) can be found fraternizing with their neighbors, five of Jane Austen's six novels (the missing one is Emma). Two different editions of Kafka's Metamorphosis lounge dangerously close to a boxed set of Anne of Green Gables. And yes, alongside The Basic Writings of Nietzsche sit all seven Harry Potter books.

It also follows these odd contrasts that, when people ask me what I like to read, I am stumped. I scrounge for an answer that will express the fact that I love books, words, the smell and feel of pages so much that I will read basically anything handed to me (except maybe Hamlet – after a bad experience studying Hamlet for four months with a teacher who insisted that Ophelia and Laertes were more than just brother and sister, I have not yet been able to overcome my dislike of the whiny Danish prince and his incestuous relatives).

What I usually end up saying is simply: "I read everything." A bit of an overstatement (considering the Hamlet issue), but I think it's an appropriate summary.

It's safe to say that my love of books has seeped into every corner of my life. Every book I've read, whether it's Literature or not, has affected me in some way. I often find myself explaining things in terms of books I've read. When breaking up with a boyfriend, I once explained my doubts about the relationship in terms borrowed from Louisa May Alcott: I was Jo March, and I wasn't sure if he was Laurie or Friedrich. After that break-up, for some unknown reason I found immense comfort in the familiar rhythms of Emerson. "Nature," "Self-Reliance…" I lounged in self-pity on the couch clutching a hefty copy of his collected essays. Emerson's lofty transcendentalist language was to me what a pint of Ben & Jerry's is to most girls after a break-up. Yeah, I never said there was anything normal about my book obsession.

Certain seasons also bring cravings for certain books. Autumn is the herald of a rereading of my favorite book of all time, Dodie Smith's glimmering I Capture the Castle. On those bleak grey November days between fall and winter, I find myself craving the frenzied windswept moors of Wuthering Heights. The first snow usually leads me to dig out my battered pink copy of Jane Eyre, and in midwinter I turn to Tolkien for a cup of tea in a hobbit-hole under a hill. The rainy growing green of spring brings a ceaseless desire for Jane Austen's delicate wit, immortal heroines, and dashing gentlemen in coattails and cravats. The warm lethargy of midsummer often finds me hefting the blue tome that is the fifth Harry Potter. In back-to-school season, I turn to my favorite poets, following Yeats down into "the place where all ladders start" and quietly singing songs of myself with Whitman.

I am captivated by the words on pages, by the life waking and breathing between two covers. Opening a book is, to me, like conjuring a world, like resuscitating an old, old memory. Between the lines on a page I fancy that I can see the authors and their glowing lives. In Walden, between the measurements of pond depth and dates of the first ice, I can see Thoreau making popcorn over the stove in Emerson's living room and telling stories about bullfrogs and birds to the children. Behind the sharp dialogue of The Picture of Dorian Gray, I see Oscar Wilde strolling down a sun-drenched street with a bunch of gladioli in his pocket. In each chapter of Pride and Prejudice, I see the motion of Jane Austen's pen traveling across the page and hear the sound of the pen-tip against the edge of the inkpot, the rustle of paper hidden as callers entered the room.

Basically, all I'm trying to say is this: I would not be who I am without books, all kinds of books. Needless to say, I relate all to well to this oft-quoted line from Louisa May Alcott: "She is too fond of books, and it has addled her brain."

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