The very best part of the house in which I grew up was that it sat about a block and a half from the Palo Alto Children’s Library. The library and my house were separated by a single quiet street, and I remember vividly finally being old enough to cross that street alone – it meant I could head to the library whenever I wanted, or, more precisely, whenever I had finished a book. At the time, that meant trips nearly daily.

Walking in the library door, I was treated like a regular at the Four Seasons. Everyone greeted me by name. Recently purchased books I might like were set aside, ready for checking out. By my recommendation, books hidden deep in the shelves were moved to featured positions on the carrols. By the time I moved on to the adult library, I had gone through a stack of library cards, wearing the stripes off each.

I read voraciously through high school as well, pretending to be asleep when my parents would check on me so I could switch the bedside lamp back on and turn page after page until I finally finished a book in the small hours of the morning.

When I hit college, however, my pace slowed dramatically. Certainly, I accumulated a slew of class texts – but as a double major in neuroscience and computer science, there wasn’t much on my shelves that could be mistaken for pleasure reading. What little time and energy I might have had for further reading was eaten up by the companies I was starting, the musical groups with which I was playing, or my burgeoning alcoholism. Between it all, reading, and fiction reading in particular, fell by the wayside.

Post-college, I came back to reading fiction in fits and starts. I’d pick up a book and consume it whole. At its end, though, without another to leap immediately onto, whatever small momentum I had built petered. I’d go several weeks before picking up another novel or short story collection, enjoy it enough to curse myself for falling of the fiction wagon, then again wait several weeks more to start another.

Recently, however, the momentum I needed, the long stretch of one book after another it took to get me back into my old ways, came not from fiction, but rather from business books. Setting out to write one of my own, I piled for re-reading the ten or twelve such books I had drawn on most in my busienss past. Driven by the excitement about my own project, I blew through each with startling speed, taking notes along the way. Suddenly, wherever I was – in the kitchen cooking, riding the subway, waiting for a film screening to start – I had a book in hand, filling errant moments with as many paragraphs as I could sneak in.

Those books finished, and with nothing on my shelves calling out my name, I started invading the collections of my roommates. Both writers, they had each amassed row after row of fiction I’d never read. I’d pick up a book one evening, and by the next find I was 200 pages deep. At the end of each, I’d replace the suddenly lifeless block of paper on their shelves, and pluck out the next.

I’m on my fourth book of the past week. And I can’t help but think those Children’s Library librarians would be rather pleased.