I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to read for me these days.

Since I had my son Noah in 2015, my feverish days of non-stop reading and devouring books one after the other have long gone. My time is shared with this fiery (and often exhausting) little being, whose development and experience of life requires my attention and love with a ferocity and immediacy that is something to behold.

I have always read to live more fully, to live a million lives, to look at life through the prisms of a glass not darkly, but much, much brighter. Fiction always felt to me like the infinite ways light is reflected, projected and caught in ice, the beauty and wildness of currents frozen in space.

Now I want to read to beat death. When time contracts, when you have to carefully choose where your energy is directed, I want to read books that feel vital and necessary. If I waver between two titles, I often ask myself, “Which one should I read first, if I were to get hit by lightning in a week?”

It’s a different kind of reading. It is less idle, unbridled and innocent. It feels more like a decisive and urgent act, a choice born out of intense curiosity and a mysterious pull that I cannot fully explain, nor wish to understand.

We are always morphing. My past experience of reading, with all its youthful ebullience, had to die somehow and be reborn to meet this season of my life.

There are so many pieces of ice to look at life through and I want to hold the brightest ones.