Reading

4/29/2016

From a very early age, I have loved to read.  Jeff would tell you that I don't as much read, but skip through books by not reading a line or two now and again.  

Some of you may remember the Little Golden Books.  My Dad would read to me each night from those books.  I give thanks to him for instilling in me a love for books.  I ready the Bobbsey Twin books, and the Nancy Drew mystery stories.

As a teenager, with chores expected to be done timely, I was often in trouble for promising to peel the potatoes just as soon as I got to the end of a page.  Mom knew that there was no end of a page in sight, because I just kept reading, until she raised her voice a little to "jog" my memory!  

I read books from Danielle Steel and Jacqueline Sussan.  I know I read books from other authors, but no names come to mind at the moment.  I read Danielle Steel's books for a very long time, until I became bored with the reoccurring theme: rich man, beautiful woman, romance - the end!

Doing some research, the first mass-market, pocket-sized, paperback book printed in the US was an edition of Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, produced by Pocket Books as a proof-of-concept in late 1938.  At first, paperbacks consisted entirely of reprints, but in 1950, Fawcett Publications' Gold Medal Books began publishing original works in paperback.

Dad was retired from the Air Force, but we made frequent trips to the local Air Force Base to buy groceries and to browse the PX book selection.  I have no idea how many paperback books I bought during my teen years, but I'm pretty sure it was a large number.

As a mother who also worked full-time, there were a number of years where I didn't have much time to read.  But then the boys began to grow up, and I had more free time.  I began anew a love affair with the local library.  And make no mistake, I can bore through a good book in no time at all. (See skipping through a book above!).

When I started working for some attorneys when we moved to Maryland, they introduced me to murder-type books.  For a long time, those books became my genre of choice.  I don't remember why I stopped reading those types of books, but I began to steer away from blood and gore.

I wanted to read a "gentle" mystery.  A genre that I am reading still.  A gentle mystery is one where the body is found, but there is no blood or gore.  Some local busybody, who sees herself as a detective, manages to find the criminal.

My spare room, at one time, bulged with books that I had bought.  Sadly, due to poor eyesight and a cataract, reading a paperback with small print is very difficult for me.  

I now read almost entirely on my Kindle.  The new Kindles coming out have very small screens and are lightweight.  Last year, I bought a second Kindle DX, which hasn't been manufactured since 2014. The DX has a 9.7 inch screen and you can make the type super duper large.  The newer DX had a few features that my older DX didn't have.  So swimming against the tide of smaller, lighter Kindles, I am sticking to the "bigger is better" notion!

Amazon offers unlimited books that you can read for free and you can have ten of these free books out at a time.  I always have ten books, as well as others that I just have to have so I pay for them.  I keep a three ring notebook by my desk that has pages and pages of books I want to read.  I rip out the sections of magazines that review books, and add those pages to my notebook.  I know you're thinking that I put a lot of effort into my "what to read next" list, yes I do but the work (if you can really call it that) always pays off.

P