At least school has died down a little bit so reading a non-school book is actually possible right now. Slim chance I’m going to finish it on time but the gals are cool and I think (hope) they’ll forgive me if I don’t. But it’s in transit and should be at my local library within a couple days, I plan to read every night until I finish. I promise.
As far as favorite of all time though, that’s a toughie. Somehow I feel like I’ve already written about this particular topic, having a slight déjà vu moment. Anyway, obviously as a young child I probably had some favorites but other than the Nancy Drew series (yes I owned them all, maybe my mom still has them in the attic??) I can’t really recall any others. I do have a few favorites that I used to read a lot when I was a teenager:
• The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
• Call Me Anna, by Patty Duke
• Different Seasons, by King
• The Goonies, the book based on the movie
• Sybil, by Schreiber
All but Poe & Schreiber I still have on my shelf. Which is saying something because I pretty much only keep books that have strong meaning and significance to me. That’s not to say that Poe and Schreiber weren’t powerful influences in my teenage years of course, it’s just nowadays with sites like Poestories.com, that I visit frequently, I hardly need to own his work right? Sybil I should take out of the library again, that book blew me away as a kid.
As I grew up I moved into other genres and grew to appreciate an entirely different type of writing. I own the unabridged version of The Poetry of Robert Frost and as you can see from the photo, it has gotten quite a healthy bit of reading done to it since I first got it. There are 4 bookmarks currently holding places for “October”, “The Road Not Taken”, “Fire and Ice” / “Dust of Snow”, and, “The Lockless Door”.
“Dust of Snow” is one of those poems that always brings a smile to my face on days I’m feeling particularly stressed out or sad. If you’ve never read it I recommend looking it up because it’s short and simple. Here’s a good site to find a lot of his work.
At any rate, this is a book I really treasure and those places are held because I’m feeling them right now, but the placeholders rotate often. I probably go back to this book at least once a month, sometimes more often than that, just to get lifted.
Not to say that all his work is peppy and happy, not by far, but there’s something about his voice that just feels light to me regardless of the subject matter. I suppose compared to the organized chaos I get from Poe’s work anything would seem, I don’t know, I guess subdued.
Now as an adult I’ve found quite a few authors and books in general that I’ve really enjoyed but there aren’t many that I hold onto anymore. I suppose with the knowledge that I could get any text I could ever want in some form of electronic media makes me both happy and sad.
Happy that I don’t have to hang onto all these books in my collection forever.
Sad that I don’t have to hang onto all these books in my collection forever.
You know what I mean? Readers who are also writers will most definitely understand.
There is something about holding a book in your hands, feeling the thickness of the paper, smelling the ink inside, or smelling the other books it was squished between for the last fifteen years while it sat unread on a library shelf. A book touches on all five senses regardless if it’s a technical manual on how to restore old cars or a hardcover copy of “The Works of Shakespeare” that’s so old it has no publication date printed.
(As a side note, I inherited the above mentioned Shakespeare book from my grandparents and it’s pretty awesome, but I’ve never been able to get through the entire thing because the typeface can not be more than a 3pt [at best] and after a while the eyes start to ache, ya know?)
I could include pictures of all these books but for today’s challenge I’m going with Frost. As I looked through the other books on this list his was the only one that had even one bookmark. I guess its time to hit the books!
In the first paragraph I mentioned the Book Club, I can’t recall off the top when my next selection is but I posed the question if anyone would mind going back to the classics and so far I think everyone is in. Yea! Now…what to pick, that is the question!
So what’s your favorite book?
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Catch up on anything you missed 30 Photos, 30 Days
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1 comment:
David Copperfield...or The Grapes of Wrath. I haven't read Lolita yet either. We haven't picked our next book yet and I figure I've got till June to post the review so...yeah. Anyway, I'll probably read it next week. :)
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