when to use your emergency brake

Reading is escape. A way to get out of your environment and into your imagination. Did you just find out that the girl you liked doesn’t like you back? Or that your mother lost her job? Or that you’re moving to a new city, where you don’t know anyone? You can take a break from being you and, instead, become a whaler, a space cowgirl, or a father and son on a cross-country motorcycle trip. Reading is a way to leave the real moment for a better moment, if only for a little while.

I felt the same way about driving when I was a teenager. To get in a car was to head somewhere new, to leave, if only for a little while. A good book and a good car are similar in that way: they can get you where you need to go. Even if the destination is nothing more than “not here.” 

But before you can drive, and before you know how to use a book, you have to be taught—parents, siblings, a valiant corps of fearless teachers. Someone takes you to a parking lot and teaches you how to turn the wheel. To turn the page. How to push down on the clutch and find a favorite author. When to use your emergency break and when to counter-steer and what science fiction is and when to stop reading a book that’s too frightening. (Not that the latter has ever happened to me.) 

Isaac Fitzgerald's foreword to 826 Valencia's Quarterly 16 

Illustration by Wendy MacNaughton