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I read a great quote recently about reading: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

I won’t even tell you where that quote came from because you would laugh hysterically(so if you really want to know, email me or find some creative way to get in touch), but isn’t it profoundly true?

So my question to you who are reading this blog this morning or afternoon is this:

What lives have you lived recently in your reading? Come on, share with the rest of us.

I’ll start: I just finished Emma Donoghue’s (“Room”) new novel, “The Wonder,” set in Ireland in the 19^th century, the story of Nurse Lib Wright, who is hired to spend two weeks watching 11-year-old Anna O’Donnell, who is said to have eaten nothing for four months in her tiny village cabin where she lives with her parents and cousin.

So for a few days, I was Lib Wright, atheist and skeptic, struggling to see God’s hand in this scenario and coming to love a small child whose faith and trust was greater than anything she could comprehend and whose story broke her heart. It stretched me and made me think about my faith in God.

Earlier this year I was Marina, a physician/researcher who goes to the jungles of South America to find her lab partner and discovers instead another world of awe and mystery. Believe me, I was glad to get my feet on solid ground when I finished this one by Ann Patchett, one of my favorite authors who never fails to provide lives to live vicariously!!

And those are a few of the lives I’ve inhabited in 2016. How about you?