It's Not that I Can't Read...

So, as one will do after years of forced (albeit mostly enjoyable) reading and writing, I took a break of reading and writing.  Well, not completely.  You can see from my blog that I lost the writing thing.  I didn't completely lose the reading thing, but I did do it as sparingly as my writing.

Having grown up a voracious reader, this was shocking to me.  From the age of about four until I was 33, I was always reading a book.  All the time.  I always had a book going.  I'm generally a book snob, so often it was Steinbeck or Hemingway or Flannery O'Conner or McCarthy or Palahnuik or some such artsy fartsy character study.  But, I did delve into the fabulous world of true crime, Steven King, and most anything V.C. Andrews because I am human and a female.  I have read most rock bios and those of Hollywood's leading ladies up through about Natalie Wood.  I reread my favorites and found new ones to love.

Then it stopped.  After years of undergrad and grad school (in which my degree is reading and writing based), I just lost reading.  Lost it.  Sure, I've read a few books in the last few years, but it is just that.  A few.  I think it may be three. One was I am Not Myself These Days. One was the novelization of the movie Urban Cowboy.  And, one of those was Fifty Shades of Grey that turned out to be just as stupid and pathetic and unsexy and anger inducing (not because it was overly sexed but because that girl was the worst sub ever and had no right to be such an asshole about it the whole flipping book since she knew what she was getting into although they never really got into it at all and had boring sex the whole book until he spanked her and she left him just proving that women are pretty absurd and often times too bossy and bitchy for anyone to actually like) as I thought it would be.  By the way, don't bother with it.  It's soap opera porn for bored moms.

Anyway, this lack of my ability to get interested in a book started bothering me.  I've revisited my favorites: East of Eden, And I Don't Want to Live this Life, Lolita, The Shining.  I've tried.  I got part way through each of them and quit. I started other books and never finished.  I have a Eudora Welty, a Wally Lamb, a biography of Keith Moon, a book about being a drummer in a band, the Bob Mould biography, and a Christopher Moore book all going.  I've not finished a one and none of them are even in anywhere I can find them.

So, I've been worried about and bothered by this for a while now.  Like really bothered.  I'm a reader.  I'm a writer (mostly meaning I write things.  I am not so brave or sure of myself to call myself an actual writer). This has always kinda been my thing.  So, it has bothered me.  I've tried to force myself to read, but it hasn't worked.  I even have a Kindle (which is the coolest thing I own, and I love it so much!), so I've downloaded books.  And, nothing.

Then something happened.  My dad and step-mom came to visit a couple of weeks ago and brought an old box of books I left in their attic when I was a teenager.  In it was a book-the book- that seems to have broken my not wanting to read spell.  When I picked it up, I knew. I knew that was the book that would do it, and I took to reading it that night.  It wasn't a quick a read as I suspected it would be, but it was the book. I'm actually now rereading it just because I enjoyed it the first time.  I'd read it before some years ago, and I am so glad I packed it away in a box for me later to rediscover, devour, and enjoy.   The book, you ask?

For real.  Thank you, Judy Blume!