My first meme.....

Okay, I admit I had to look up the word 'meme', but Betty C was kind enought to tag me with one, so now I know!
And it's about my favorite things, books......

My reading: I have been a steady reader since about the age of 8, when the worlds of Harriet the Spy and Nancy Drew were first introduced to me. And one of my most fond memories of school has always been story time, a time when the teacher came alive and took us on an adventure. I clearly remember Where the Red Fern Grows and Superfudge from this time.

Through most of high school and university, I read a range of things. I had a Holocaust period, a Hemingway and Kerouac phase, as well as phases that switched from Danielle Steele to Mary Higgins Clark.

I studied French literature at university, so my reading became filled with Sartre and Hugo, de Beauvoir and de Musset. Prevert was a particular favorite, as well as Stendhal. I tried to read as much as I could in French, paricularly with authors like Flaubert who you knew worked so hard, so precisely in French, it seemed wrong to read the translations.

After university, I had already moved to Europe, so depending what I could get my hands on in English, that tended to be what I read (Grisham, Ludlum, le Carré).

While living in the UK I started working for a bookshop, which actually for a reader is a bit of a nightmare. Way too many books. Where do you start? If one book doesn't hold your attention for long enough, there's another one waiting in the wings to take its place. I had a permanent leaning tower of Pisa next to my bed for four years. I became a book whore, and my memory is so blurred, I've probably forgotten most everything I read. Except for a few, which will stay with me indefinitely, and I'll get to those later.....

Now with the small ladies, I still find I'm flitting between books, but I've lately found my groove again and have been able to do some good quality reading. The last few books I've read have filled me with that feeling you get, the one that's hard to describe, when you are in the middle of a good book, your mind is consumed with it, and you don't want it to end.

What I love about reading is that it doesn't have to be fiction to transport you, non fiction can open up another world too, and sometimes it's all the more interesting because it's based on reality. So I find I probably read a 50:50 ratio of fiction to non fiction.

So, now that this post is long enough, I'll continue with the rest of the meme in my next post!