My Reading Journey – Stephanie

September 15, 2025 - By Falan

For the first six years of my life, I lived in the middle of nowhere on the Crow Reservation. My dad taught in a one-room schoolhouse serving local ranch families. I loved where I lived. My house was mostly quiet and afforded me ample time to think and imagine. Outside my house was a vast, empty landscape that stretched as far as I could see. Once a month, the school kids, my family, and I took a trip to Sheridan to go to the public library. The library felt like the opposite of my house. It was stuffed full of books and people. The opportunities for stories and experiences there made it feel like the whole place was buzzing with life. I loved it there too. My middle-of-nowhere life and the stuffed-full library felt the same to me: alive with possibility for endless growth, new experiences, and fresh understanding.

My reading journey is reflective of my life’s journey. In the rural setting of my formative years, I learned about the expansiveness of reflection and solitude. My experiences at the public library taught me to seek out stories, try new things, and forge connections with others. Reflecting on my childhood helped me make sense of my reading tastes, which have always been voracious and varied. I bounce between genres and intended audiences. What connects the books that have meant the most to me are the ways in which they aided me along my journey of exploring the vastness of interiority (my own and every other human’s) and the limitlessness of the world outside my door as it extends to the whole universe.

The “Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything” may or may not be “42” as Deep Thought, the supercomputer from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy calculates, but through reading, I have the most profound opportunity to connect my thoughts, feelings, and experiences to others who have bravely shared their own stories. Tracy K. Smith, who does her own exploring of the Ultimate Question in her poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” makes a beautiful hypothesis that amid the lonely immensity of the universe, our shared stories connect us and help us find meaning:

“Sometimes, what I see is a library in a rural community.

All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils

In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.

The books have lived here all along, belonging

For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence

Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,

A pair of eyes.”