How Books Became My First Adventures
When I was younger, before I had the chance to travel anywhere on my own, I used to sit on the floor of my bedroom, open a book, and feel the walls around me disappear. The hum of the house would fade, and suddenly I wasn’t in my small town anymore. I was in the middle of a London fog, or standing on the deck of a ship bound for somewhere I couldn’t even pronounce.
What I loved most was how effortless it was. I didn’t need a plane ticket or a packed bag—just a quiet corner and a book. Reading became my secret passport, one no one could take away from me.
The first time I read about Paris, I hadn’t even been on an airplane. But through pages, I learned the rhythm of its streets, the smell of warm bread in a bakery, the glow of lanterns by the Seine. I still remember underlining a line about the Eiffel Tower sparkling against the night, and thinking: Someday, I’ll see this for myself. Years later, when I finally stood there, it felt strangely familiar, like I’d already visited through the words of a novel.
Books taught me that places don’t have to remain distant. Even the ones I’ll never see with my own eyes—ancient Rome, Victorian England, a futuristic Mars colony—feel close, because I’ve walked them in stories.
Reading also gave me something I couldn’t get from a map: the chance to live other people’s lives. I’ve been a painter frustrated by an unfinished canvas, a young girl falling in love for the first time. Some of these lives were nothing like mine, yet they left me with feelings I carried long after closing the book.
Sometimes I think that’s what makes reading so powerful—it stretches the heart in directions it never knew it could go. It asks you to step into someone else’s shoes, and for a while, you forget your own.
Now, whenever I pick up a book, I still feel that same thrill I did as a kid. The sense that I’m about to leave where I am and discover something new. Maybe it’s not a city or a century this time, maybe it’s just a new perspective, or a truth that shifts the way I see the world. Either way, it’s travel. Quiet, invisible, and endlessly life-changing.
I’ve come to realize that reading is the one kind of journey that never ends. Every book is another departure. Every story, another arrival. And though I may never have all the stamps in my passport that I once dreamed of, I know I’ll always have this one, the one made of words, carried everywhere, and opened whenever I need to go somewhere I’ve never been.
