Reading List

I'm a reader. In fact, I was a reader before I could even read. Seriously! I wanted to read so bad that I would hold my parents books in my lap and pretend to read them. (At least half the time they would be upside down.)

I prefer fiction and I tend to gravitate towards lighter reading but I'm not really choosy. I am a fairly fast reader...which can be bad because sometimes I go so quick the content doesn't really settle in. Or if I'm in a hurry to find out what's about to happen, I'll start skimming through the prose. I never skip ahead. In fact, I don't even like to read the blurb on the cover. I don't want to know what's going to happen until I'm supposed to. I almost always finish a book if I start it.

I've gone through several reading droughts: when I was in college, when I first started working, when I had kids. In the last year or so I've started reading again. I'm still hot or cold with it. Sometimes I'll go for weeks...or maybe even months without picking up a book.  Right now I'm on a reading kick.

Last year I read the Twilight books and Stephen King's Dark Tower series. I enjoyed the Twilight books and LOVED the Dark Tower books. While reading the DT books, I went off on a tangent and read The Stand and Salem's Lot. (And Farenheit 451, which is kind of random since it's not an SK book.) There are a couple of other SK books that I want to read now, which were relevant to Dark Tower, so one of these days maybe I'll get around to that.

In the meantime, a few months ago my sister-in-law loaned me a stack of her favorite books. I've really been enjoying them. Thanks Amy!

So anyway, for my purposes as much as anything, I thought I'd list the novels I've read so far this year:

American Gods by Neil Gaiman
Five Quarters of the Orange by Joanne Harris
Dead Until Dark by Charlaine Harris (a Sookie Stackhouse book)
Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman
Gerald's Game by Stephen King (reading)

Scrapbooking

I'm reading Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life and it really resonates with me. I think it helped me find my voice. Simple Scrapbooks gurus Stacy Julian and Cathy Zielske both recommended it so I picked it up and am enjoying it. Although I can see that it would not be everyone's cup of tea.

This evening we sat outside and watched the neighbors' fireworks. Oskar and Kardynn slept through it but the other two girls sat outside with us. I was snapping pictures and Dwight was recording with one of his numerous devices. He has some cute audio of the girls.

[sound of mortar explosion]
Annika: "Daddy, hold my hand!"
Kiersten: "Daddy, I not tared."

Dwight and I with our hobbies...it's so wild how you develop a passion for something and then get such enjoyment out of it. Right now I can hear Dwight down in the basement beating away on his drums. I've been sitting here playing around with a scrapbooking layout...tweaking it here and there throughout the day. We're both so into our things. We used to have a lot more overlapping interests but I think now that our free time is such a precious commodity, we both retreat to the hobbies we're most passionate about. So he's delving into his music and I immerse myself in my various "family historian" pursuits - captioning my photos, posting to my blog, et cetera.

Well, it's about two hours past the time when I should have gone to bed.