I don’t get the impression that my readers get especially excited about my book blogging entries, but hey!  It’s my blog!  and I LOVE to read.
I’ve been reading–really reading, books not just words–since I was four.  I spent my entire childhood with a book in front of my face.  I read at the table, while walking down the hall, while brushing my teeth, in the car (makes me car sick these days but didn’t back then), in bed at night . . . I remember how thrilled I was when I realized the bathtub was another good place to read!  I’m also a fast reader (I started the final Harry Potter book as soon as I got home after buying it at midnight and finished around daybreak) and averaged one book a day as a child.
Not much has changed.  Of course I am busier, so it may take me longer than one day to get through a book, particularly if it’s non-fiction.  But if it’s a thriller, I’ll usually find myself staying up late if necessary to finish it in two days.  I wish I could say that my book choices were always literary or educational.  I have a running list of potentially edifying titles (complete with library call numbers, so that I can easily check them out when I have time to read them AND my library card is not shut down due to fines or lost books) that I want to read.  I jot down titles whenever I read about something that sounds intriguing to me.  This typed list is well over twenty pages.  It’s probably not possible for me to ever read them all.
Plus I already  have an entire bookcase in my closet of books I already have that I need to read.  And a box at the foot of our bed of old favorites to re-read.  Hi, I’m Leslie, a book addict.
And I’m not the only one.  John and Emily are fellow addicts and we all enable one another.  We have 30 or more books in boxes in the garage, full bookshelves in almost every room, and piles of books under tables.   We go to McKay’s to get rid of some of our books and we come out with another bagful.  We leave our church’s monthly book swap with a big stack.  You know those book clubs you can join and get lots and lots of books for a penny?  I join those, buy the minimum, cancel, and then join again a year or two later.  I don’t know why they keep letting me do that, but they do!  There’s nothing like getting a big box full of hardcover books in the mail.
So with all this bounty surrounding me, and my list to try to get through, and a library close at hand (I’m hovering just below the fine cut-off limit!), you might think I improve my mind daily with educational or literary gems.  And occasionally I do.  But the truth is, my brain is so tired out by the demands of life that what I really like to do is escape when I read.   Right now I am reading Capital Crimes, a joint effort of Jonathan and Faye Kellerman, husband and wife who are both successful authors.  I picked that up in the library because I couldn’t find any more of Jonathan’s Alex Delaware psychological crime thrillers that I had not read already.  In more or less the same genre, I enjoy Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta forensic crime novels (especially when they reference Knoxville’s very own Body Farm!) and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Milhone mysteries.  I’m a huge Agatha Christie fan too and have an entire shelf of her works, courtesy of the aforementioned McKay’s.
I have a couple of non-fiction reads going, one of them a collection of the best of Verbatim, a word-lovers’ journal.   I usually choose non-fiction when I don’t have a lot of time to read, since I can easily put it down.  I’ve read numerous “Love Inspired” Christian romance novels in recent weeks, which are pretty much brain candy, that I get free in the mail from time to time.  On the serious non-fiction front I read (and highly recommend to you, if you have a teenager) Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy by Michael J. Bradley.
What will I read next?  Well, I could go look at the book shelf in my closet and pull out Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard, which I’ve been meaning to re-read, or Life is Worth Living by Fulton Sheen, or The Warren Report, or the biography of Charles Dickens, or the book about the history of the Black Death.  But I probably will look in Emily’s room for a vampire novel or an old childhood favorite instead. 🙂