Where were some of your favourite reading hideouts when you were a kid? Under the blankets with a flashlight? In your cabin at camp while other kids ran down to the beach?

I distinctly remember several spots where I’d sit with a book and let the story take me away. An early memory is of sitting on the floor in a corner of the living room behind a big armchair. We moved when I was eight so I was quite young. I’d brought a book and realized no one knew I was there when I heard my parents come in and begin a serious conversation. I didn’t understand the words but I knew from the tone that, in that moment, remaining in my hiding spot was probably for the best.

I brought my books everywhere. We moved away and my books came with us. I read in the camper as my parents tried without success to find work in a strange town. I read in the small cabin relatives offered us while the adults worked on a new plan. I read in a cottage in the light of kerosene lanterns during a short-lived but thrilling time of life by a lake with no road access, plumbing or electricity. And when our journey brought us to a new home I found a great place to read tucked into the trees beside the river.

I was a quiet, solitary kid living in Northern Ontario and loved the worlds reading opened up to me. I had no idea such places existed and that the people there felt the same things I did. It’s that emotional connection that good authors strive for.

For no matter where we live or what language we speak, there are some things that are universal and when we read it’s those things that connect us. Joy, grief, confusion, anger, injustice, loneliness, love and hope. We enter another’s pain and happiness, we see how they find a way through and hope grows within that somehow we will too.