#TheBookofMe: What Do You Read?

When I was a kid, my aunt would give me books to read, but I seldom enjoyed them.  I guess it was rather like being assigned a book in a school class -- you never like them, no matter how good they really are.  An example of that is To Kill a Mockingbird.  I read it when I was about 14, voluntarily, and enjoyed it immensely.  My daughters, when they were about the same age, were assigned to read it in school, and they hated it.  It's the idea of lack of choice, I think, that makes these really good books come off not to our liking.

Anyway, in high school, I did not read much until the eleventh grade.  In my high school, the English teachers would require us to keep a file, and write the names of books we had read, whether for an assignment or on our own time, on the inside of the folder.  In tenth grade, I may have had ten books written down on the inside of my folder at the end of the year.

Over the summer, some sort of switch got turned on, and I started reading like a possessed person.  During my junior year, I had read so many books that I had the inside of my English folder covered on front and back, and in the margins as well!

So what do I read?  My first inspiration to begin that eleventh-grade reading binge was Ray Bradbury.  I read all of him I could get hold of, then moved on to Isaac Asimov.  I read in other genres, too.  I read Steinbeck.  I devoured everything he ever published.  Then it was Hemingway and Faulkner.  I read all of their books, too.  I read Adela Rogers St. John, the newspaper reporter.  My favorite of hers is her autobiography, The Honeycomb.  I got into mysteries, and read all of Agatha Christie.  I tended to prefer cozies to the hard-boiled detective stories of Raymond Chandler and the like.  I also read several excellent biographies.

Of course, I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy when they came out.  At that time, I was in college at Florida State University.  It was during that time that I also got into the ancient Greeks, reading a goodly portion each of Aristophanes, Euripides, Aeschylus, and some others.

Childbearing years had my reading in a different direction -- such as Where the Wild Things Are, The Velveteen Rabbit, Winnie the Pooh, and other great children's literature.  There wasn't much time for adult reading during that time!

I tended to lose interest in science fiction about the time cyberpunk became the thing.  I just couldn't sympathize with the troubled, distant, odd protagonists.  I still retained my interest in mysteries, however, and found enjoyment reading Patricia Cornwell and Lawrence Sanders.

From my youth also, I began reading about history.  I had a subscription for many years to American Heritage magazine, back from the days when it was published in hardback into their paperback years.  Just a year or so ago, I finally re-homed my collection of American Heritage, giving them to an American History teacher friend of mine.

What do I read now?  A great deal of my reading today, of course, is focused on Spain and her colonies, especially La Florida.  I also enjoy another set of cozy mysteries, the wonderful stories of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, written by Alexander McCall Smith.  Our whole family went on a seven-book binge when J. K. Rowling started publishing her Harry Potter stories.  We read every one of them, and enjoyed them. 

I also have been reading books written by friends of mine from an online writing group I've been a member of for over thirty years!  It is because of that bunch that I have two books of my own in print.  And a cousin of mine has just published her first mystery, so that is on my very long To-Read Queue.