Ever since I was very small, I've had the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. I remember watching trains flash by and wishing I was on board. I remember going to the airport with my parents when I was 13 and reading the destinations board, seeing all the places that I could go to: Los Angeles, Chicago, London. But the trains passed by and the planes took off without me, so I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of Middlemarch and A Little Princess, and to St. Petersburg before the fall of the tsar ( 沙皇 ) with Anna Karenina. My home was in a pleasant place outside Philadelphia.But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books. In books I traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might achieve, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. I travel today in the way I once dreamed of traveling as a child—on airplanes and intrains. And the irony ( 具有讽刺意味的事 ) is that I don't care for it very much. I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, books. The only thing I do like about traveling is the time on airplanes spent reading. It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to lether spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the real destinations, and the journey too. They are home.