Reading

I received a lovely journal for Christmas with prompts to help document my life for posterity (AKA Olivia). (Tee Hee). I am going to participate in a 31 posts in 31 days challenge for January, so if nothing exciting happens, I will take prompts from my journal Today I am asked what one of my favorite activities was as a child.

To say that I loved books as a child would be a gross understatement. My first novel was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl. I read it in first grade and then moved on to Nancy Drew. In grade school, I loved the Bunnicula series, The Indian in the Cupboard series and The Fairy Rebel by Lynne Reid Banks, plus any mysteries I could find. When I got older I moved into the Babysitters Club Series (I learned everything about babysitting from them!), the Chronicles of Narnia, Little House on the Prairie (it always irked my inner literalist that these books were under fiction when they were true!), Dealing With Dragons, Jeremy Thatcher Dragon Hatcher, The Sword in the Stone, the Landover Series by Terry Brooks. I never stopped reading. I never read because someone wanted me to, I read because I loved it. I would disappear into a book. My father scolded me many times for reading at the dinner table. I read on picnics, in the car, on planes, in company and all by myself. I had excellent grammar not because I studied it but because I had a vast exposure to the written word.

And then I grew up and married someone who loved to read as much as I do, and we often read at the dinner table. Actually the dinner couch, we don't really have a kitchen table. But the theory is there.

I still have most of the paperbacks I read as a child, as well as the addition thousand or so that my husband and I have picked up along the way.

As an adult my tastes have broadened even farther. I have read almost all of Michael Crichton, devoured the Harry Potter series multiple times, read all of Dan Brown, read much theology. I still read children's books more than anything. I have read Tad Williams 4000-page series Otherland three or four times. I am reading four different fiction books right now.

And that's not even getting into non-fiction...