“你常常一邊走路一邊看書嗎？”
I looked up from my desk, startled to see my Chinese professor looking at me expectantly. She had been passing out our homework from the previous day, and my peers and I were reviewing our vocabulary for the upcoming quiz. It took me a moment to realize she was talking to me and to recognize what she was saying:
“Do you often walk and read at the same time?”
I laughed when I caught her meaning, admitting that “對,” I am an occasional book-walker. Though I usually keep an eye on my path, I have been walking with books in my arms since childhood, ever enthralled by those words on the page. Erin Hunter’s Warriors was the first series to find me reading everywhere I walked, but that habit continued as I fell for other spellbinding works like C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and my most recent culprit, Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone.
Montag of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 once said, “There must be something in books, things we can’t imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house.” I might add “to make a woman risk collision with a bicycle” to that statement in light of my book-walking habits, but the idea remains: books captivate their readers, taking them outside of their own perspectives to explore the thoughts of others and consider other mindsets.
Perhaps book-walking was one of the catalysts for my pursuit of fiction writing — after falling for the characters of other writers, I grew determined to create my own stories that led readers to think about other perspectives and step outside their own lives. This election year and the events surrounding it emphasize the importance of this self-reflection through reading as people from all sides neglect to consider their opponents as whole people. Especially now, exploring a diverse selection of books impacts the reader’s understanding of the world, encouraging them to view even those with divergent beliefs and perspectives in a civil and rational light.
Though book-walking can be a dangerous pastime, potentially leading to awkward collisions or scraped knees, neglecting to explore a diverse, constant list of books can risk someone’s capability to understand the perspective of others, even those with beliefs radically different from their own. Books show the complexity behind the thought processes of villains and heroes alike, reminding their readers that even the most threatening characters are more than a label.