Last week on my commute to work, an odd thought popped into my head. You would think that I would be mentally planning out my day, or at least just thinking about what I was going to eat for breakfast, but that wasn't the case. I was thinking about a character from a book I read when I was 8 years old.
I don't know exactly what prompted me to think about Nellie, the best friend of Samantha Parkington in the American Girl series, but here I was on the 8:30 a.m. express train thinking about how poor Nellie worked in a factory to support her family. I do know that I'm not alone in this interesting habit. Megan noted that she thought about the same character, Nellie, while watching a movie a few months ago. Morgan admitted that she frequently thinks about the kickball story from Sideways Stories from Wayside School, without any reason.
I'm sure that there is some scientific, psychological explanation for why our brains bring this kind of information to the top of our heads, but I think it really says something about the power of reading, especially from an early age. We may not be able to remember the small details of our daily lives when we were kids, but the stories we read can have such strong staying power and influence over our thoughts. I like to think that with every new book we read, we gain new windows of perspective through which we can interpret the world around us. What are some of the stories that you can't get out of your head?
