Every year, I read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and every year, it convinces me that it is never too late to change.
In the same way, I remember reading Katherine Paterson’s Bridge to Terabithia for the first time, encountering this sentence: “He felt there in the teachers’ room that it was the beginning of a new season in his life, and he chose to deliberately make it so,” and feeling the promise of those words.
Again and again, stories have delivered this life-saving message to me: it is ever-possible to change, to deliberately begin a new season.
Thank you to all of you (teachers, librarians, booksellers, parents) who put books into the hands of readers, books that help us change, help us become our better selves.
(The art is by P.J. Lynch, from his miraculous illustrations for Dicken’s A Christmas Carol)

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