reading has turned my brain!

I read this today and since one of the best goals I ever did was take up a 20 book challenge for the year, it seemed appropriate to share. 'Meditation for Women(and men) who Read Too Much' Virginia Woolf believed that when we who read too much arrive at the pearly gates carrying our beloved books with us, the Almighty will tell St. Peter: "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading." In real life there are people who read and people who read too little. There aren't people who read too much because this is an impossible feat. How can one read too much with only twenty-four hour days? Lifetimes that average only 80 years? Andy time of the day is perfect for reading. Any place. Any excuse. Reading is the last refuge for addictive personalities; there are no bad side effects from reading too much. Louisa May Alcott thinks becoming too fond of books will "turn" our brains. Of course, any women so fond of books that she felt compelled to write her own can't be all wrong. Books do turn us. Turn us on to our passions and to pursuing our passions. Turn us into authentic people. When a sentence in a book resonates within, it is the voice of your authentic self.Listen to what its trying to tell you. Spirit is constantly communicating with us. Most of us long to experience Paradise on earth. People who read, do. Whoever said that you can't take it with you obviously never read a good book. For everything you've ever read, loved, and remembered is now a part of your consciousness. What is once cherished can never perish. 'Reading means,' Italo Calvino tells us, "[being] ready to catch a voice that makes itself heard when you least expect it, a voice that comes from an unknown source, from somewhere beyond the book, beyound the author, beyond the convention of writing: from the unsaid, from what the world has not yet said of itself and does not yet have the words to say."