THE GIRL WHO KEPT A BOOK IN HER PURSE

ALL THROUGH HER LIFE, Valerie constantly had a book with her. It was simply her thing, a part of who she was.

Just like her first boyfriend, Kenny Roberts, had dark hair, and her BFF from grade school, Renee Johnson, had freckles, and her current boss, Dwayne Worley, had a moustache. Having a book at the ready and wait was just who Valerie Robinson was.

Everybody knew it.

She was known as the girl who kept a book in her purse. And she was cool with that.

A famous author once opined on why more people didn't carry a book with them all the time. In his opinion, it was the perfect entertainment: no batteries needed, no advertisements, hours of enjoyment or moments of needed escape, perfectly adaptable to one's personality and interests, deep and meaningful or light and insubstantial. Books were the perfect diversion. Of course, he was an author and, therefore motivated to convince people to buy his books. Nevertheless, in Valerie's opinion, he had a valid point.

Even when she was in kindergarten, Valerie remembered always having a picture book with her. As she progressed in school, her level of reading was continually a step ahead. By the eighth grade she was already reading Jane Austen and Victor Hugo. In high school and through college, she went through a myriad of stages: soft porn romance novels, biographies, science fiction and science fact, horror and suspense, fables and fairy tales, detective novels, spy thrillers, modern day vampire romances, apocalyptic zombie books, from poetry to textbooks. Her tastes ran from King and Koontz, to Asimov, Bradbury and Clark. She sampled authors like a smorgasbord, from Graham, Sparks and Steele to Grisham, Flynn and Meltzer. Her list of novels read like a buffet of off-topic literary volumes.

After she graduated with a degree in Publishing, she soon became a proofreader, editor and eventually a publisher for one of the big New York distribution houses. She had always wanted to make her living in books and the written word.

Even out of school, Valerie still kept to her obsessive reading ways. She was always in the middle of at least one book. It was as if she were her own best customer.

In fact, so immersed in the belief that she always had to have a book (or two or three) in progress, in her mind, she became convinced that if she were to completely finish whatever books she were reading, and she was truly between books, she would most certainly die.

Hence, the need, however irrational, was viable.

Therefore, whenever she went on a trip, she always had her current book plus a couple packed away, just in case. It didn't matter there were bookstores in the airports and Barnes and Nobles in every major city.

Whenever she slept over at her boyfriend's apartment, she always had the book she was working on, plus a back-up. Never mind the fact that her apartment was just the next building over. In the little time it would take to run to her place for a replacement, she could be hit by a car, murdered in the stairwell, or fall down an empty elevator shaft.

To Valerie Robinson, not reading was certain death.

And the fact that she preferred actual books to Kindle or e-readers just made it more problematic at times. She knew from a rational point of view that she could fit hundreds and hundreds of books onto an electronic hand-held device. But it just wasn't the same, she thought. There was nothing as visceral as holding an honest to God, flesh and blood book in her hands.

She had also tried her hand at writing, but soon found she didn't have the talent or creativity to become successful. She was OK with that. She did the next best thing: provide readers with what she loved most.

Books to read.

By her fourth year at the publishing house, Valerie had moved up the chain of command and was now the Senior VP in charge of new authors. It was a role she took most seriously and one she valued immensely. Introducing fledgling authors to the world was, she imagined, like watching your child walk across the stage at graduation, full of hope and promise, confidence and trepidation, their future laid out in front of them.