What I’m reading now…and how I got here

This is a reprise of one of my original posts from Red Room.  I am both a writer and a reader. Expect to see a little of both…what I write and what I read, but I digress. 

Here is the content of What I’m reading now…and how I got here.

When I was young, all I wanted to do was learn to read. In fact, to me, I couldn’t wait to start first grade so that I could learn to read. I was a bit disappointed when we didn’t start reading on the first day of school, but I decided to give my teacher another chance since it was only a half day.

The next day I headed to school with high expectations of “this is it“–the day that I learn to read. Well, suffice it to say, I didn’t learn the next day, or even the day after that. It was several weeks before Mrs. Gallant brought out the large easel-sized Dick and Jane book with the first story called “Look”. Perhaps you remember it; obviously, I still do and remember the excitement I felt about reading my first story. I remember that everyone started out together. Eventually, we were sorted into reading groups…I was a Brownie! (not a Bluebird or Redbird) The Brownies skipped ahead in the reading department. We were the first to get the Dick and Jane book of Guess Who which introduced the word ‘the’ which our teacher told us would be hard to remember because there wasn’t any real thing or idea to tie it to and that it would be easy to forget. I never did…I made sure of it.

My younger sister, however, was never enthralled with reading. In fact, unlike me, she didn’t have a teacher who motivated her to read, and frankly she struggled with it. Although we were just a year apart in school, we always seemed to have different foci. She was more active and I, well, I wanted to read, to escape into books and travel the world through story. Yet, she was my constant playmate, and therein lay the problem. I would want to read my current book, and she wanted to go outside and play. Her remedy was to hide my book so that I couldn’t read it, and then we’d go outside. Over time, I learned to read more than one book so that if my current read went missing, I’d have another in the wings to take over. Because of this, I have always managed to carry more than one story in my head. In my younger days, it became a necessity.

Now, I still do it depending on where I left my current reads. Right now, I am reading several books including Debbie Robson’s Crossing Paths: the BookCrossing Novel, Joanne Fluke’s Apple Turnover Murder, Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called “It,”  and That Takes Ovaries: Bold Females and Their Brazen Acts, an anthology edited by Rivka Solomon.

Of course, there is a downside to reading four disparate books at a time. Sometimes plots do get tangled together which makes for some weird plot lines (at least in my head).  Such is life!

I’ll probably report my thoughts on each in another post.