This is one of those posts that really, unless you're interested in the hows and whys of my reading 'cycles' you can certainly skip and I won't be insulted. Thanks for stopping by all the same.
Before college I was obsessed with reading. I remember reading Somerset Maugham for a grade school book report. And Postern Of Fate. I probably was the bane of my English teacher's existence. My first romance was Jane Eyre, which I read with a box of tissues on my bed, sobbing. I made my way alphabetically through the stacks in the school libraries, heck I STARTED the library club, a good way to avoid kickball during recess.
And therefore it made perfect sense to me to take English literature classes in college, and I ended up majoring in English. Which was good, don't get me wrong. I'll never be able to forget the Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Lovelace...I can't get rid of my Chaucer or my Arden Complete Shakespeare...I still have the New English Translation of the Bible I bought for $18 second hand - my first *real* Bible, complete with this strange thing called an Apocrypha...it's all fresh as the day it happened.
But I also got completely and totally burned out with reading.
After college I started working in a little indie bookstore in my hometown. I believe I was there for about 4 years, and I did find some new authors, but for the most part I immersed myself in young adult and children's literature. Sometimes I would try and get into something 'fluffy' (Diana Gabaldon, anyone?) but I just didn't have the stamina for it. Books came out, great books, books I heard amazing things about, and I couldn't do it, I couldn't read them.
Eventually it got to the point where it wasn't so much that I didn't have the energy so much as I'd gotten lazy. Reading takes muscles, and I didn't have them - I was reading weak.
It was about 4 years after I started at that bookstore that I decided to go back to school, and that necessitated a move, and THAT meant a new job, this one also at a little indie bookstore. This bookstore specialized in children's books, and I read tonnes of them. And you know, there are some great authors out there who write fantastic books - but I knew that they weren't challenging me.
Enter the child-bearing years. Four long years of vomiting, nursing and dragging recalcitrant offspring to the library in order to try and find/borrow a book for them, and then a few weeks later to return it late and pay the fees.
So here I am, now, smack dab in the difficult toddler years with two babies and a third on the way. And if you think I have time for reading then you just come on over here and do my laundry for me. But for the first time in a long while I was unhappy with every old five-times-re-read book on my shelves and I needed something else to read. Which meant that yesterday I went to the library and did something I haven't done in almost a decade...I wandered up and down the adult fiction section looking for a 'good book'. I found four, and I'm doing my best to read them, to get 'back into the game'. I'm so far out of the game I'm in another park; I couldn't tell you who's won ANY prize in the past five years with the exception of Alice Munro. Who's short stories I didn't like.
I'll let you know how it goes.
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