What I Read This Year

I have been a bookworm all my life. Bookworm being the old fashioned word for what is now termed a pathology, bibliophile?, loner? I have only recently downloaded my
first e-book onto a cheap pad I got. It's Bleak House for free. I used to have a complete set of Dickens from about 1880. It yellowed and fell to pieces. Couldn't hold
the books at all. I collect antique books, nothing fancy just what I like. Bulwers Works, Ben Hur, almost all of Dauphne DeMurier. I would be one of those folks with
shelves cutting through the middle of the living room if I could get away with it, piles of books like towers everywhere. Now I suppose I could collect books on hard drives, but that lacks the aesthetic appeal; or the smell. The new soy inks don't have that lovely off gassing smell of chemical inks.

I remember the day I learned how to read, like lightening striking, like learning to breath under water. It was a fantastic, trippy experience as some part of my six year old brain exploded into awareness. When I would laugh at jokes about Dick and Jane, I would feel a little guilty sadness because they had done so much for me. I won prizes in second grade for reading the most books, could read college level by the age of 12. Granted I can read and comprehend well, but that doesn't translate into writing skills as my high school teachers hated teaching diagramming so any syntax or grammer I have is by accident. I don't know anyone who reads like I do. My daughters have to read
because they are in school but they don't rush home to read like I did, high in the magnolia tree like a strange monkey. I have never caught them reading with a
flashlight lost in a world of knights and poetry. They don't lie in bed all saturday morning finishing up the last of a book that they saved for a morning thrill. None
of my husbands read all that much, a magazine, internet. My second husband was a lawyer so he had to read and he did like Hunter S. Thompson, but other than that.
So for the New Year I wanted to list all the books I read in 2011. I can't make a reading list for 2012 as I don't know where my mind will take me. But I can tell you where I have been. Did you know you can get a list of all the books you have borrowed going back at least five years from your local library?
View my blog for the complete list and feel free to let me know what you have read this last year. Happy New Year
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