Kindred Readers

During this season of giving, I have been doing my very favorite kind of matchmaking—matching readers to books I hope they will love. Sometimes people ask me to recommend books for people I don’t know, and this can be a fun game. I get hints about what sort of reader the person is—she’s thirteen and loves horses; he’s ten and into historical fiction; she’s twelve and wants books with strong female protagonists—and I do my best to suggest titles the reader may enjoy. But I don’t get the satisfaction of knowing if the choice was the right one, and even if I hear later, “Oh, he loved the book you recommended,” I don’t get to see how the book impacts the reader because I never knew him (or her) in the first place.

What I enjoy most is choosing books for people I know. If I know the reader well, and I know the book well, I can (sometimes) make a perfect match. And few things are as satisfying as giving a person a book that becomes one of her favorites, not just because it’s nice to be right or because it’s nice to make someone happy, but mostly because it’s a privilege and a delight to offer a person the words, stories, characters and places that become part of their world view or part of the architecture of who they are. I can think of no higher praise than, “She always knew what I should read.”

Sometimes I know what someone should read because we always like the same books. If I like it, she will like it. If I lie awake at night thinking about a character, so will she. If I incorporate the language of the book into my own lexicon, she will, too. And this is not just a matter of taste. It is a matter of identity. Of what thrums the soul. These people who live in and for and around the same books that shape my life are “kindred readers.” It is a wonderful thing to give a person a book. It is a higher order of wonderful to discover that a person is a kindred reader.

I hope each of you will receive books this season. And I hope you will give yourself the gift of re-reading books you love. I hope that you will give books, too, carefully chosen to ignite a reader’s passions, whether you share those passions or not. But most of all, I hope this holiday brings each of you the gift that will broaden and enrich and embolden you everyday—the discovery of kindred readers in your life.

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