Guest Post: Katie Williams (The Space Between Trees)

Hello, Readers!

We’re one letter off today. Instead of Kate, you have Katie writing to you. Delightful Kate has been kind enough to let me take over her blog today so that I can introduce my new novel, The Space Between Trees, the story of what happens when lonely teenager Evie lies about her friendship with a classmate who was just found murdered. You can read more about The Space Between Trees, including the first chapter, at www.katiewilliamsbooks.com. But here today, I’d like to honor I Just Wanna Sit Here and Read with a post about, well, sitting and reading.

It all begins with my optometrist:

I make my optometrist’s forehead wrinkle.

“One or two,” she says, flipping different prescriptions in front of my eyes.

“Two,” I say.

She bends in front of me to check something on the machine. Her forehead wrinkles. They’re worried forehead wrinkles. I can see them only because of the glass she’s placed over my eyes. As soon as she pulls it away, everything will be fuzzy again. She pulls the glass away.

“Your prescription really shouldn’t be changing this quickly,” she tells me, shaking her white blur, um, head. “Are you straining your eyes?”

“Well,” I say, “I read.”

“In poor light?” The worried wrinkles have somehow traveled from her forehead down into her voice like bean plants spreading a fine tangle of roots deep into the soil.

“I mean, I don’t read in the dark. There’s always some light.”

“You need a good reading lamp. And do you take breaks to rest your eyes?”

“If the book is good,” I admit, “it’s hard to stop.”

She sighs. “We had this conversation last time, didn’t we?”

We did. We have this conversation every time because, though by librarian standards I am a wonderful reader because I love to read, by optometrist standards I am the worst. Now let me be clear, the optometrists don’t object to my liking to read; the trouble is where I like to read.

I like to read in corners. When I was a child, I would pull my bed a foot out from the wall, drop a book into the crevice and slide down after it. “Katie!” one of my parents might call, but I was safe. Even poking their heads into my bedroom, they wouldn’t find me. In high school, I would fold myself on the floor in between my nightstand and dresser. The heating vent was there, after all, and Michigan mornings were cold.

Even now, as an adult, with an apartment full of places to read and no one calling me to set the table for dinner, I still prefer my secret spots—the floor under the windowsill, the place where the hallway bends, in the corner where the recycling is stacked. I choose these places not just for the practicality of not being interrupted, but so that I can be hidden. Though it’s about more than being hidden, even; it’s about being not here. After all, an entire world full of people and events is there between the covers of the book! If I can make myself small and unobtrusive in this world, maybe I’ll be able to travel a little further into that one.

Where is your favorite spot to read? And why is reading better there? Feel free to post a comment below!