As a reader
I am slowly reading a book. I purposefully am reading it bit by bit and stretching it out over multiple days and even weeks by now. The reason for this conscious choice is that this hardcover bound literature makes me feel, remember and notice things that I really and truly need to in this period of my life.
As I keep going through this process (and maybe even progress?), I have realised that I want to start a new tag and series in this blog. About me as a reader and about the books I've encountered. Because sometimes going around and excitedly telling about it to All My Friends seems not only not enough, but also is putting my friends under some strange pressure. I mean, this is probably the whole reason why the bookstagram community exists :D
My life as a reader started fairly early. My own memories of that time are mostly fuzzy and blurry trinkets of random episodes. But one thing I do know for sure, I was taught to read pretty much as soon as my relatives could communicate with me coherently enough. And soon enough, I'd be spending my days in "the cold room" (the room above the not so deep basement) with my head immersed in worlds way beyond my own.
A lot of my childhood and tween reading was guided and regulated by the adults. But, it was also back in the days when leaving a child home alone was not considered explicitly bad. So, the obvious side effect of this was that the child in question could easily get into books that were deemed "not age appropriate" without any of the adults the wiser.
However this idea hadn't popped just in my little mind, and the more responsible people in my life put in a counter measure. It was a good one and mostly worked as intended. The plan being - keep supplying and recommending to the child enough amounts of "appropriate" literature, so she doesn't get to the other kind. Not too bad as controlling ideas go. This also means that I had read the collected works of Agatha Christie by the age of 12. If I remember correctly, by then the particular collected works series consisted of around 20 volumes. Amongst other things like a few Sherlock Holmes books, some general adventure stories, lots of religious literature, some biographies, animal adventure books (I hope I never have to read those ever again), a bit of fantasy, and obviously most of the stuff I had to read for school assignments.
But at some point, everyone just came to terms, that I did keep sneaking in the odd "inappropriate" book here and there. For example, this would be certain French romantics, the likes of Dickens and Hemmingway, and the odd crime novel that had some "spicy scenes" in (totally **gasp, eyeroll**). By the way, all that hetero stuff I read at an early age did not make me a hetero. So, you can come to your own conclusions on that subject.
In the history of me as a reader, we've come to the part where I gained total control (access to books permitting) of my reading material. In age terms, I was probably around 14, and I had discovered the great interwebs.
I will stop here for now. But expect more posts and tellings from and about me as a reader.
Be brave, just read the book you want - that's what I had told myself once.