Through the years, I’ve always loved read­ing. I’ve read more some years than oth­ers. This seems to be a pretty good year for me, but I’d always like to have more time for read­ing. Some day, it will hap­pen, right? Please?? Any­way, for a long time, I found a lot of sat­is­fac­tion in read­ing a lot of books. I read vora­ciously. I read every­thing. I read any­thing I picked out. In the past year, I have found that I don’t find as much sat­is­fac­tion in that as I used to. Now, I’m really look­ing for a book that means some­thing to me. Maybe since my read­ing time is much more lim­ited, I want each book to be an expe­ri­ence. I want to take some­thing from it. I want to be a dif­fer­ent per­son because of it. I want to know the char­ac­ters. I want to appre­ci­ate the style. I don’t sim­ply want to fin­ish it.

This is part of the rea­son that I was so dis­ap­pointed when I spent an evening read­ing a book from our local library the other day. It had the promise to be SO good! When I read the back, I was hooked. I brought it home, and I wanted to devour it. I knew that I would fin­ish it all in one evening. Unfor­tu­nately, after about the first three or 4 chap­ters, I started skim­ming. Then, I started really skim­ming. By the end, I was pri­mar­ily read­ing only the first and last page of each chap­ter with a glance to the other pages. Then, I read the end­ing, and I thought “ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!?!??! That’s how it ended??? Ugh.”

Now, for those of you who are won­der­ing what the name and/or who the author of
this book is, I’m not going to say. What? Yes, I know. The thing is that books are so indi­vid­ual. A person’s tastes are so dif­fer­ent. I don’t want to say that a book is ter­ri­ble and have peo­ple not read it because I didn’t like it. I am per­fectly will­ing to give rec­om­men­da­tions of books I enjoyed and con­sid­ered to be good, but I don’t think it’s fair for me to label a book as “bad” for some­one else. I love books and writ­ing and read­ing too much to do that for anyone.