I have a confession to make

You know that smart girl who always has her nose buried in some ridiculously long novel?  That wasn't me. In fact, until recently I didn't find reading particularly enjoyable.  I remember my mom reading to me all the time as a small child, and I had no trouble learning how to read.  When I was about six, my mom came home to find me reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.  She asked me what I was doing, and when I told her I was reading, she said, "But that book has no pictures in it." To which I replied, "I know, I'm reading."

I'm not sure what eventually caused me to give up reading as a form of recreation.  Maybe it was the traumatic experience of having my favorite book about sharks at school cut up for use in someone's project.  Maybe after being forced to read Where the Red Fern Grows, which I thoroughly despised, I thought of books as schoolwork instead of fun.  Or maybe I was just lazy and preferred to watch television and play video games.

Sure, I read things like Harry Potter, and as I got older, young adult novels aimed at teenage girls, in which the heroine always ends up with the guy she has a crush on (or someone even better if he turns out to be a jerk).   However, as hard as my mother tried, I just could not get into classic literature.  I thought, "Why do I have to read this? It has absolutely nothing to do with how people act and speak in the present."  I couldn't get past the sentences that seemed to go on forever or the pages of description that did nothing to advance the plot.  It didn't help that my school put much more of a focus on writing than on literature in its English classes.  In elementary school, we only read short selections out of a textbook.  In high school, we finally began reading books, but most of them were relatively short.  The only books I actually remember liking were To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, and a book by Ernest Hemingway (I can never remember which one).

About the time I started college I realized that literature does have something to do with the present.  Besides the fact that it often hits on universal human themes, intelligent people often reference literature, and it would make me seem more intelligent if I understood those references.   Unfortunately college students, especially ones pursuing liberal arts degrees, are already assigned more reading than is realistic, so I never had time to read novels for fun.  I would start one in August promising to finish it before I had much schoolwork to do, but it never happened.  Robinson Crusoe and Crime and Punishment are still sitting half finished at my mother's house.  When it became clear that I was going to take some time off before continuing my education, I decided to read as many novels as possible to make up for what I had missed. A few months ago I made a list of 101 things I wanted to do in 1001 days.  I set a goal of reading 50 novels and 50 works of nonfiction, which will never happen at the rate I'm going (all of the novels so far have been over 400 pages), but I can try.  My new reading habit has been made easier and more affordable by the discovery of a public library relatively close to where I work and do my grocery shopping.

Books I read recently and didn't hate.

So far I have read Moby Dick, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, and Middlemarch by George Eliot, which I just finished today.  My next post will most likely be about my reactions to Middlemarch, not necessarily a book review, just some things I thought about while reading it.  I will try to write similar posts about each book I read.