I'm Back (I Hope)

To say that I've been neglecting this blog and this project is a gross understatement. As the list attests, I've only just finished book #17. At the rate I'm going, I'm not going to make it.

I've been trying to figure out what the hell happened. I was so excited about this project at the beginning of the year. When I did my 365 Project last year, I rarely missed a day, and by this point in the year, taking a picture of myself each day was just a habit. But the same thing didn't happen with this project. And I've been trying to figure out why.

At first I thought it was that I was just reading crappy books. I started the year off with Mockingjay, which I just hated. Then I read a book to cleanse my palette, but then I read Water for Elephants, a book, which, the more I think about it, the more I hate it. But looking over my reading list since January 1st, I've read some good books, some by my favorite authors. So it couldn't just be the books. And that's when it hit me.

It was me.

During my reading of The Weird Sisters, I began to consider something. The Weird Sisters is about these three sisters who all come home after they find out their mother has cancer. Their father is this emotionally distant professor who finds more life in Shakespeare than he does in the outside world. The thing that links these very different girls together is their love for reading. On some level, it is a book about the love and fundamental power of reading.

Which got me to thinking about my own reading habits, and I came to the conclusion that being an English major in college nearly ruined my love for reading.

Look, I love the fact that I have a BA in English and I would not have had it any other way. But all that critical thinking about literature bled over into my recreational reading, and it was causing me to hate books. I first noticed it when I read the book Death in Daytime last fall. Admittedly, I was only reading this book because it was written by Eileen Davidson, who plays Ashley Abbott on the Young and the Restless. But I still expected it to be somewhat decent. It SO is not. The writing is amateurish and there's so much telling and not showing and SO MUCH UNNECESSARY DETAIL. Seriously, it was a struggle to get through. While I was reading it, I tore every single chapter to shreds. But I didn't think much of it, since it was a fun little book, and by a celebrity, no less.

But then I started to do it to every single book I read. And look, I get that not every book published has phenomenal, A-grade prose. Some books really are terrible. But I couldn't let anything go. I would analyze every single thing to death (as my previous posts this year attest), and it would consume me so much that I couldn't really enjoy reading any more. In a way, I started to become wary of reading, because I started to expect to be disappointed by books. I even started to wonder if I could ever enjoy reading again.

And as someone who will live and breathe the library every single day for the rest of her life, I know that that's no way to live. But I kept reading, and books continued to disappoint. The tipping point for me was reading the book Matched. Don't get me wrong here, the book has its fair share of flaws (the biggest of which is that characters would often jump from point A to point C without any explanation as to how they got there), but I couldn't even enjoy the act of reading the book because my mind was so busy analyzing the crap out of the terrible writing. After Matched, I don't think I read a book for a solid two weeks. Which for me, is a very long time. Perhaps the longest I can ever remember choosing not to read anything.

A few months ago, at the beginning of this reading crisis (as it were), I happened to catch an episode of Bones while my brother was watching the series. I'd seen this particular episode probably three times already, but this time around, something Angela said just stuck with me: "You need to learn to enjoy things as they are." That kept with me for awhile. And it wasn't until last week or so that I really connected the dots. I was taking every book far too seriously and I wasn't enjoying things as they were. I just needed to take a step back and recognize that I was reading for entertainment. Not for school, not for my career, but to have a good time. So the pressure needed to come down. Way down.

I needed to get back into the swing of reading. But nothing in my stack of books interested me, so I did the clean sweep. Took everything I had back to the library, and got an entirely new stack of books. I had a bit of a misstep, when my first book was Cat of the Century by Rita Mae Brown.

Let me explain: I have never read a Rita Mae Brown book before, and never intend to read another, but this particular book happens to be centered around William Woods University, which is just across the street from Westminster College (where I went to school). I just had to know how good old Fulton was portrayed.

Anyways, that book was terrible. I mean, just godawful. There were random tangents about the environment and the economy that had absolutely NOTHING to do with the plot. At all. But I could feel my bad habits starting up again, so I decided not to finish the book. Now, for me to start a book and get more than 20 pages into it and not finish it is very rare. In the past five years, I've done this to maybe 2 books. I don't know, I just feel...obligated to finish it, you know? Anyways, that's neither here nor there. So I picked up the next book in my pile.

I fully credit Diana Wynne Jones and Howl's Moving Castle for helping me get my reading mojo back. This was a re-read for me, but it's been so long since I read it the first time that I don't really remember a lot of what happened, so it was like a new book. And after I finished it, I realized that I hadn't made a single complaint about it while I was reading it. I just read. Enjoyed the book the way it was. And then, I just knew: I could read for fun again. My love of reading wasn't gone forever. Just quelled a little bit, until something could pull me back out. In the week since I've finished that book, I've read two more.

I'm back, baby.

Even though I'm WAY behind, I haven't given up hope on this project. If I can manage 12 books a month, I can do this. And if not, that's okay, too. There will always be more books. And now, I'm finally read to read and enjoy them as they are.