Random Thoughts on Reading

In the spirit of my anniversary, I got to re-reading old posts. It's funny. It almost feels like some of those were made in another lifetime. I used to write book reviews!!!!! I'll try to recapture some of that old joie de vivre that I seemed to exhibit back then.

I have been a very lazy reader of late; only managing to read the chick lit that I used to so despise and books related to my work.

So, right now I just finished Lucy Sullivan is Getting Married by Marian Keyes (probably THE queen of chick lit). And I am currently reading Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits by Leslie R. Crutchfield & Heather McLeod Grant.

The Marian Keyes book, to be perfectly candid, was NOT great. It was a good laugh in some parts. But Lucy Sullivan is one of those extremely tiresome characters who grates on your nerves with her chronic poor self esteem, which causes her to make questionable choices in men (What? Like so many of us? No, not quite. Her's is to the max).

I had to suffer through interminable chapters of her being "in love" with a total loser, who anyone could see was a scrounger who only came round for sex or money or food (or frequently all three). I had to flip impatiently through the pages until she FINALLY came to her senses. It was all very painful for me.

So why didn't I just fling the stupid book out of the window? Well, I've started a lot of books in the past that I never finished, often because I thought the book unworthy of my time. Well, that works sometimes; after all, life is just too short to spend time voluntarily doing something you're not enjoying (though, a popular school of thought believes that suffering builds character). But, over the years, I decided that I was leaving too many books unread and would save that for when a book was truly, truly bad. Besides, after you've spent money on the book, the least you can do is to finish it.

I have a brand new Marian Keyes to get started on and this one actually looks quite promising. It's called This Charming Man.

My other new book reading rule is to read one book at a time. I typically do not follow this rule and in the past and result is about half a dozen partially read books. When I absolutely need to read more than one book simultaneously (which is still all the time), I read books of very different genres or types. This usually takes the form of 1 'fun' book and 1 'work' book.

Well, enough of my blah, blah, blah. I could better spend the time reading.