Foreword

Books for the Journey is a guide especially for traveling the world between childhood and adulthood. This journey is rarely easy; happily, books can be sources of enlightenment, comfort, knowledge, understanding, and even wisdom along this often tumultuous landscape.

Good reading is about expanding our capacities and about understanding what it means to be human — whether fiction or history, poetry or biography, art or science. Through reading, we come to know the world in which we live. We learn about who we are and how we feel. Watching Hamlet struggle to come to terms with his destiny, we grow courageous about our own futures. Experiencing the hilarity of the offbeat Gully Jimson, a starving artist in London (The Horse's Mouth) we learn to laugh at ourselves. Poetry especially takes us inward to that mysterious world of metaphor where things are other than what they seem. At its best, reading can be a spiritual experience. Through reading we create rich imaginations which pull us beyond our own lives and into the fullness of Life itself.

A book is a ticket to another world. I discovered this early on, first in pouring over the pictures of my earliest children's books and later in creating the inner pictures that every good writer evokes. Besides the normal joys of swimming, hiking and riding my pony, summer was a time to withdraw into other worlds. I had a book with a bookplate of a child reading in a tree. I took this to heart. Hauling my ever-patient beagle, Spot, along with me, I would climb into the cherry tree outside my house, position myself on a natural seat of branches, and read until someone called me back to my more mundane life and family chores.

By the time I was a teenager, reading took me into new worlds peopled by exotic colors and smells. I could be in India or Africa, inside the homes of the very rich and the very poor, inside the minds of saints and villains. But, most of all, especially as a teenager, reading allowed me to glimpse new possibilities and to explore the mystery of what it means to be a human being in all its myriad shapes and forms.

Here, then, are hundreds of opportunities to explore wonders, exotic and ordinary. It is a long-needed compendium of some of the richest literature available for young people and their elders. Its pithy descriptions of each book and easy-to-use categories will help readers, educators and librarians find rich and rewarding reading material of almost any description. It can serve as a guide for a lifetime of reading.

May the journey be rich – and, as the Irish say, “May the road rise to meet you!”

Meg Gorman, Humanities Faculty
San Francisco Waldorf High School
San Francisco, California

$19.95

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