Books (April A2Z ~ Misty Memories)

Mommy and me, around 1965

Welcome to my April A2Z posts! This time, I am officially signed up on the challenge sheet and will be visiting other bloggers on the list. My theme is "misty memories," which will include a bunch of rambling about old stuff in my life, and hopefully some of it will be accurate, but if not, there's no one around to contradict me. Today we continue with B for Books.

I have always been an avid reader. It’s genetic! Both my parents loved to read, and my daughters do too. It could be environmental, of course ~ if a child sees people enjoying books, naturally she will want to pick one up and see what the big deal is. The first book I remember reading on my own, maybe around age 4, was called Artie the Smartie. It was about a fish. I liked the Bobbsey Twins books a lot when I was around 8-9 years old, and then I graduated to adventure books about dogs. I began as a dog-lover, and my twenties, I switched to cats, though I still love (nice) doggos.

At 10, I read The Velveteen Rabbit, a beautiful story which made me cry and still does. I reread it from time to time.

By the time I was 12, I was reading adult romances ~ yes, the kind the drugstore sells. At first, they were "light" Harlequins, but that's just a gateway drug, and eventually I moved on to steamier stuff. As I have mentioned before, this was bad for me, and as a parent I wouldn't have allowed it (luckily, my daughters had no interest in romance novels and still don't). My parents, however, were of the hippy dippy 70's mindset that nothing should be censored from anyone, and they also believed that reading was so valuable it shouldn't be discouraged. I suppose that's a fair point, as I did have a much wider vocabulary than my peers. 

Anyway, I read everything, and I mean everything. The Happy Hooker. Playboy. Hustler. This was all lying around at my parents' house and at the houses of people whose kids I babysat. (OK, sometimes I had to search for it, lol.) A lot of this material was inappropriate for a young teenager because I couldn't put it in context or process it properly as fantasy. It messed up my head and self-image. I didn't look anything like the women I read about, and in my mind, physical appearance became tied to love: if you weren't beautiful, in very specific ways, you weren't going to be loved. That is how my 12-17 year old brain processed this reading material.

I also read tons of mysteries and detective novels and some biographies and autobiographies of celebs. I still enjoy those genres. For decades, I continued with the romances, gravitating toward novels set in the Regency period, but right now I'm tired of them all. I'm also a bit bored with thrillers, as after reading hundreds of them, they aren't that thrilling. 

I still love books though, just not the reading rut I have been in lately ~ I have struggled to escape and return to the magic of books! These days, I'm apt to choose one that's simply different from stuff I've recently read. Poetry, biography, science, philosophy, etc. Case in point: at the moment I am reading Love of Goldens, a non-fiction "coffee table" book with loads of photos of gorgeous golden retrievers interspersed with adorable vignettes.

Everything old is new again, eh?