I’m ready to read

Reading is a top-notch pasttime, in my opinion.

I recently heard someone say they were the type of kid who would have loved to hold their birthday party in a library. I don’t like parties that much, so I am not that person, but the hanging out by books part sounds nice.

Growing up, I loved series like The Boxcar Children, Nancy Drew and The Red Rock Mysteries. They were fast reads, too, so I could read through a whole series pretty quickly.

Once I got to high school, books I read just for fun became few and far between, and by college, reading for fun was a non-existent activity (though that literature class almost felt like fun reading).

I enjoyed the books I read as part of my classes, but it’s just not the same as reading something purely for entertainment.

Recently, I’ve been able to pick reading back up and have started working through the list of books people suggested I should read, and books where reviews piqued my interest. After not having time to leisure read for multiple years, my list was getting quite long.

I started by picking up The Odyssey again. I began reading the book about three years ago, when the excitement of having a library card again was still fresh. I made it about halfway through, before reality caught up with me and my free time got a little tight. I returned the book to the library and made a note on my phone which chapter I left off.

Then, I promptly forgot about it for years on end. At one point, I deleted the note with the information about where I left off, because I knew I wouldn’t remember what I already read anyway.

I can confirm I didn’t really remember the story, so I started over. The book was good. You gotta love the classics.

From there, I read a historical novel, which was a great read and an even better distraction from the housework I was supposed to do.

I’ve been reading non-fiction since then. The first of the non-fiction books off my list wasn’t my kind of reading, despite the glowing recommendation offered to me. I read half the first chapter before I pulled up the Goodreads listing for the book and read the reviews. Yep, that’s what I thought. I finished the first chapter and gave up.

Right now, I am slowly, but surely, working on Life on the Mississippi and have enjoyed it. I have another biography coming, via Interlibrary Loan and I am really looking forward to its arrival, with a few more memoir-type books on my list.

I plan to space out that heavier reading with some romance novels. I can guess how they end, but I am perfectly fine with that.

My professor for that literature class was not fine with that. Something about thinking of a Russian lady loudly complaining about how stupid “smut” books are and how they are a downfall of society, all in a posh British accent, just makes me smile and want to read romance novels even more.

In fact, I think that’s what I am off to do next.