I Love Books
a bit about my journey as a reader and some nostalgia for when younger adult me realized I loved to read
The other week, I visited a cutie little bookshop cafe with new and used books and an upstairs with tables, cushy chairs, and big light-filled windows. Almost every table was full of people sipping a coffee and reading a book. What a dream cafe! I was lusting after the opportunity to buy a book and a coffee and immediately go upstairs to read in a chair by the window; to get lost in that scenario for a few hours.
I have a racing mind that is hard to quiet and I’m very easily distracted. I almost always have a running list of things to do or topics I’m pondering, trying to sort out, as I go through my daily grind. It is hard for me to settle my brain on one task or topic for a substantial amount of time and when I am on task, it’s easy for something to pull me out unless I have very carefully set up my environment.
That’s part of what I love about reading. When I find a book that I connect with, I can (and often do!) get sucked in and the rest of the world falls away. It’s one of the few times I can honestly say I am focused on a single thing and the present moment — when I’m lost in a good book.
"What I like is to be exquisitely tickled for hundreds of pages until I am both laughing and crying and can't take any more beauty or pain…" - Rufi Thorpe
If you’ve been here for a little while, my love of reading will not be new information. You’ve likely seen my monthly book report posts and other devotions to reading. (And if not, a few favorites below!)
But this month, I actually didn’t read many books! I’m trying to slow down and be more intentional with, well, everything, and that includes my reading. I spent a lot of time this month reading the TOB judgements and other snippets within that rabbit hole and revisited sections of books I’d already read because of various things on my mind.
Historically, I get competitive with myself about reading and want to finish as many books as I can and I’ve realized that has kept me from reading bigger or denser books that have been on my list for a while. So I took the month of March to pause and reconsider my reading desires for this season.
Instead of a book report, I’m here to share some background on my journey to becoming the reader I am today.
Early days (I wasn’t a bookworm as a kid!)
Growing up, I’m not sure I remember either of my parents ever reading a book — and I DO remember being told that reading on the family vacation was a “waste of family time” so I know it was not an encouraged hobby.
But I was a hard-working, competitive kid in the era of Scholastic Book Catalogs, which means I religiously completed the requirements to get an A+ and earn free Pizza Hut.
This did more to instill a love of pizza in me than a habit of reading.
Flash forward many years and my first grown-up job in Europe involved a commute by bus - a long one. My roommates and colleagues spent this time reading so I joined them. What else was there to do? I scoured English bookstores for new books and joined a book club. I remember reading pages and pages of ebooks on the tiny screen of my tiny iPod touch while rumbling up the hill to work.
In the 15 years since the discovery of reading for pleasure, it feels like I am making up for lost time. I can’t stop, won’t stop. I am voracious and insatiable and I love sharing what I’m reading with others. I still collect books as if I will never be able to go to a bookstore or library ever again and I gather them into piles for reading as if I have hours upon hours to read uninterrupted every single day. Many nights before bed, “just one more page” turns into multiple hours and staying up too late.
What I read (and when!)
I am opportunistic, indecisive, and a glutton for good things (helloooooo enneagram 7!). This has remained a constant since 2012 and the challenge of choosing a single thing to read has not diminished.
I have varied reading interests and currently have 7 books stacked on my nightstand and another 10 downloaded to my Kindle. Only recently have I come to accept that I will never read all the books (tragedy!) and I have adopted the practice of abandoning books I’m not enjoying. There are just too many!
All that to say, I don’t have a system for choosing what to read. I make plans and then change them and change them and change them again.
Do you have a good strategy? I’d love to hear it! What are you reading right now? Tell me so I can add it to my list!
Many people ask, “How do you find time to read so much?”
Reading is something I enjoy and I’m good about prioritizing it above many other things. I often read at night before bed and during other pockets of downtime throughout any given day.
I take advantage of audiobooks so I can read while I’m driving, cooking, running, or otherwise doing something mindless with my body by myself. I also carry my kindle everywhere so when I have a couple of extra minutes (in line at the store, in a waiting room, on an elevator, etc.) I have the option to read instead of choosing to scroll or check email on my phone*. These two things have helped me read more AND mindlessly scroll less — both goals of mine!
[*Note: LOL I still scroll mindlessly on my phone plenty. I aspire to grab the Kindle instead of my phone every time but this is a work in progress. I’m just being transparent so you don’t have an unrealistic view of my reality.]
My rating “system”
I use Goodreads and I love it. The site is clunky in many ways yet without it, I would forget what I’ve read and how I felt about it. I keep my Goodreads for myself and mostly because of the clunkiness, it’s easy to forget about the interactive elements of the site.
When I’m reading or have finished a book, I give it a rating and usually leave a review on Goodreads. At book club a few months ago, I was alerted to the fact that some of my Goodreads friends pay attention to my ratings and that, erm, they don’t make much sense. I often do not align with the masses on how books are rated in Goodreads (books I loved don’t always have 4+ stars, and many I loathe do have high ratings, for example). The guys on So Many Damn Books say that a 3-star Goodreads rating means that the book just hasn’t found it’s people yet and I love that. My star rating isn’t about my judgement of a book at all – if I didn’t like it, I just wasn’t the right person for the book at that time!
Reading for me is a deeply personal act. What I choose to read and how any given book impacts me depends enormously on what’s going on in my life at the moment. I will choose different books based on what I need from reading in that season. And the ratings and reviews I give a book also depend on how the book fit with my personal, seasonal needs. And sometimes I explain that in my reviews but not always. When I give a book a low star rating or perhaps DNF, it may just mean that the time was not right for me to read it!
Everyone has their own way for rating a book and the reading experience. This is part of what I love about the Tournament of Books — books are judged by a single person in a way that they have completely made up. This process is beautifully outlined in Rufi Thorpe’s judgment of the play-in match this year. She explains her criteria, scores each book by her chosen variables, and then clearly picks the winner for her:
If this were a contest for which book I would recommend to my mother-in-law, The Bee Sting would win. If this were a contest for which book I would give as a gift to my father, The Auburn Conference would win. But this, this has become a contest about me, about what I like, and what I like is to be exquisitely tickled for hundreds of pages until I am both crying and laughing and I can’t take anymore beauty or pain, until I am barking like a dog at the absurdity of the human condition, and because of that, the winner by a mile is The Librarianist.
As is always the case with each TOB judgment, plenty of people disagreed with Thorpe’s choice and perhaps that’s because they have preferences more similar to her father or mother-in-law!
And that is another thing I love about reading. The same book can create an entirely different reading experience for different people or even for the same people on different days or in different seasons. Books are magic and that magic is expanded and multiplied when we share our experiences with each other.
Book Reports: What to Expect
To spread the book magic in hopes of sparking something with you, I’ll continue sharing a little round-up of my reading at the end of each month. I’ll share what I read that I think is interesting to talk about (and maybe what I didn’t like!). Just because I didn’t like it doesn’t mean there isn’t magic to be found.
Hi! I’m Liz. Thanks for being here and reading my journals on the journey. If you’re new, learn a bit more about me and this space here and consider subscribing to my weeklyish posts. You can choose which types of posts to receive via email and if you read in the Substack app, you can choose to get notifications in the app instead of emails with new posts.
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And now for a nostalgic flashback: enjoy the snippet below from my old blog describing the euphoria and challenge of my newly-discovered love for reading
Too many words to read everywhere
Originally posted July 9, 2012
As a kid, I have no memories of staying awake all night reading a book underneath my covers. But in the past two years, something has happened. Now, all I want to do is read.
I like to read everything: popular fiction, classics, young adult novels, nonfiction (on almost any topic), children's books, whatever. If there are words on pages that I can turn, I would probably read it. This new hobby of mine really conflicts with my outgoing, social persona because it's hard to hang out with other people while I have my nose in a book. And it's hard to hold conversations with other people when they have not read the book in which I am currently engrossed.
In an attempt to solve these minor problems of mine, I began doing two things. The first is that I started reading in public places. This public place usually serves coffee, has a good spot to sit, and offers some people-watching for mid-chapter breaks. This evolved into having "mutual quiet time" with friends where a friend and I will meet somewhere and will chat for a bit over a coffee and then proceed to read our own books or do our own work. Our mid-chapter people-watching breaks usually coincide and involve conversation and sometimes a beer or wine follows the coffee.
Second, in hopes of finding mutually interesting conversation topics more easily, I began reading the newspaper. So I am reading 3 books at the same time, I have a shelf of 20ish books that I thought I'd read "during the summer" and the list of books that I'd like to read seems to be growing very rapidly. And now I'm going to add a daily newspaper to this equation? I'm not even working right now and I don't have time to read everything I want to read -- what will I do when the school year starts again and I'm legitimately busy with gainful employment?!
I guess in the grand scheme of life and its problems, this is small so I can probably calm down. I'll go relax with one my 8769 books.
x!
Currently, I’m reading “Refuse to Choose” by Barbara Sher