Rediscovering Reading

Hello.  Thank you for dropping in and thank you to those of you who commented on my post about Mary Jones.  I am thrilled to learn that her story spread so far across the world and that some of you still remember it.  I would love Disney to make a film about her, but I can't see it happening, can you?!  The weather here is still scorching and my lawn has turned into a spiky, yellow thatch but looking on the bright side, no growing means no mowing!  I am not very good in hot weather, my energy levels collapse and I hide away indoors, looking for the coolest place.  If the cellar weren't full of "stuff" I would be down there, in fact, during the very hot summer of 1989, when I had hardly any "stuff" and was very pregnant, I spent a considerable amount of time sitting down there in the cool, reading. 

 

I have loved reading for as long as I can remember and have always had plenty of books.  As a child I had a bookcase in my bedroom and those who know me well know that a thoughtfully chosen book is always received with delight at Christmas and on my birthday.  Being "a reader" is one of the things which defines me.  However, over the last few years my reading mojo ebbed away and I slowed right down.  In 2016 I read only four books - they were quite hefty, the original Cazalet novels by Elizabeth Jane Howard, and I enjoyed them all very much, but only four.  Last year was even worse: I read two books, not even hefty ones.  That's all.  They were both very good and I read them quickly, carving out extra time for reading because each time I put each of them down, I was desperate to pick it up again, but after I finished the second one in June I didn't pick up another book for the rest of the year.  I just didn't fancy it.  I really can't explain what happened.  Not reading felt odd - for who am I if I am not a reader? - and I was ashamed of myself, so I didn't tell anyone that I had stopped reading.  Kind people, unaware that I was no longer reading, continued to give me books for Christmas and for my birthday, my mother continued to pass on to me books which she had read, and I continued to buy myself second-hand books which caught my eye (I didn't buy new ones because I had stopped reading book reviews as well) and I was very happy to welcome all of these books into my home because I wanted to read them, but I just wasn't ready yet.  My To Be Read pile became a To Be Read shelf and eventually, a To Be Read bookcase. 

 

Towards the end of last year I accidentally joined a huge group of book lovers on Facebook.  I'm not quite sure how it happened so it must have been a slip of my finger and I initially intended to leave it because the books they were sharing didn't seem to be the sort of books I like to read - see how I still considered myself to be a reader, in the present tense, even though I wasn't reading? - but I slowly realised that I enjoyed the fact that I was around people who loved to read.  As well as posting pictures of the books they were reading and giving recommendations, they posted photos of their reading corners, book nooks, libraries and bookcases, their enthusiasm for everything about books made my world seem a better place.  So at the beginning of this year I picked up one of the books my thoughtful sister bought me for Christmas and opened the cover.  I felt ready. 

 

I LOVED this book!  I read it very quickly (for me, I know some people are super speedy readers but I'm not) and only put it down when I had to.  I particularly enjoyed Jessie Burton's descriptive language so here's a sample:

 

"The long windows were ajar, and a breeze made the curtains dance.  The dawn wind had lifted an impressive cloudscape from the mountains beyond Arazuelo, a duck-egg sky striated gold and pink.  The letter still in her hand, Olive tiptoed towards the balcony and saw blank fields spanning towards rugged foothills in the distance, patched with scrub and wild daisies, where kites circled and grasshoppers sawed in the empty melon fields, oxen dragging ploughs across the earth in preparation for later seeding."

 

I can picture that scene in my head so vividly, I can even hear those grasshoppers.  Reading this book switched something on inside me and I knew that I wanted to read again.  I also wanted to make inroads into that TBR bookshelf and start reclaiming space!  So I set myself a gentle target: this year, I intend to read twelve books.  Now, I know that is a small target, only one book each month, but it's a lot more than two books.  As I said, I'm not a fast reader, and when I finish a book I like to think about it and process it for a couple of days before I start the next one.  So, by the end of June I should have read six books.  Gentle reader, I not only met the target...I beat it!  By 30th June I had read these nine books:

 

Nine!  The one with the plain black spine is this -

It's about Dr Thomas Neill Cream, the Lambeth poisoner who may or may not have been Jack the Ripper.  The author spent ten years researching the book and it was the Jack the Ripper Book of the Year in 2016.  (I met the author and promised to mention the book here.)

As you can see, my nine books are an eclectic selection, written between 1817 and 2017, which took me from the Regency English seaside to a dystopian future where books are banned via 1870s Canada, 1880s Burma and London, 1940s Guernsey, 1970s England and the UK and USA in contemporary times.  Please don't ask me to pick a favourite because I can't, I enjoyed every one of them, all for different reasons.  Five of them will be leaving my house and four of them will be staying.  The Teacher has read two of them and one is waiting for The Mathematician on her desk.  We have been talking about books together, and I'm not sure we've ever really done that before.  I feel like a reader again, and I feel that I have reclaimed a part of myself.

 

I'm off now to 1917 Edinburgh.  See you soon.

 

Love, Mrs Tiggywinkle x