I love to peruse what is often called the “reading memoir,” and so I just finished David Shields’s How Literature Saved My Life (2013). Shields and I have not been impacted by many of the same books (what I hoped to find in his book), and so my favorite part of his was the following story that illustrates the temperament of the reader-writer:

When I was a little kid, I was a very good baseball player, but I mostly preferred to go over to the park across from our house, sit atop the hill, and watch Little Leaguers, kids my age or younger, play for hours. “What’s the matter with you? my father would ask me. “You should be out there playing. You shouldn’t be watching.” I don’t know what’s the matter with me–why I’m so adept at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor–but playing has somehow always struck me as a fantastically unfulfilling activity. (4-5)