Chasing Anna

I have always been an avid reader. In first grade I was placed in the advanced reading group. The books were red, unlike the yellow I had been reading before. I don't remember the words I read, but I remember how it felt. It felt odd and exhilarating and wonderful: I--me?--was an advanced reader!? I asked my wife the other day if she thought one was born a reader or if one acquired a taste for reading. We didn't really come up with an answer, but I think I was born a reader.

I remember perusing the shelves of the school library, barely tall enough to reach the third shelf, looking for something that peaked my interest. There were red ferns growing. Shel Silverstein. Roald Dahl. Charlotte's Web. The Hobbit. I skipped Judy Bloom and God and Margaret. I don't know why. Something about those books just never appealed to me.

And then, at the approximate age of fourteen, a single book changed my life.

My mother, grandmother, and I were in a neighboring town's mall--the Anderson mall. In the middle of the fairway--where kiosks for cell phones, lotions, fake hair, sunglasses, etc. now reside--a man was selling books out of boxes. I remember thinking there were so many books, but I bet if I were to see it now, it was a modest amount, just like the hill I used to ride my bike down seemed like a mountain at the time and now seems like nothing more than a speed bump. I had my allowance money, and so I started looking.

I was drawn to the dark, yet faded blue of the spine first. The letters were in simple block-like letters and ran across the spine instead of down. The title and author's name were etched into the spine in dirty, white letters:

Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy

It was a hard cover. There was no dust jacket. The book's cover felt like material more than paper, with a texture like it had been tightly woven together. I cracked the book open. The binding crackled: a sound that is now one of my favorites. My fingertips ran over the soft paper inside. My eyes loved the small, bold typeset. There were no dog-eared pages. The only writing was on the first page. It was in pencil and notated the cost of the book: $2.50.

I bought it. And devoured it. When Anna threw herself under the train, I cried. Real tears. Like a hungry baby, wrapped in a wet diaper, waking from an afternoon nap. Like I had pushed Anna and could not undo my actions. A book had never made me feel like that before. So engaged. So wrecked. So engrossed. So moved. So a part of the world. So in love with words.

I am in a constant search to regain that feeling. It happens maybe once out of every ten to twenty books or so I read. And while it now happens differently (I find 19th Century Russian literature moves a little too slow for my liking,) I will always be grateful for Tolstoy's Anna. She helped me cross over the threshold of adolescence and into the world of literature.

Anna made me realize that consonants and vowels pump directly into my heart.