My Love of Words Part 1

My love of words began at an early stage. My mother told me that I came home from kindegarten one day with library books and I cried because I didn't know how to read. However, once I started reading, I never stopped. It wasn't Harry Potter in those days, it was the Little House on the Prairie Series(Laura Ingalls Wilder), and I read every book in the series several times over. My favorite book as a child would have to be Natalie Babbitt's Tuck Everlasting. My mother, a reader herself, encouraged my love of books by enrolling me in a book of the month club when I was 9 or 10- thank you Mom. I read the hefty tome of Gone With The Wind when I was 11, and I still remember the passage of Scarlett returning to Tara and that awful dawning realization that her mother was dead. At 14, my friend Elaine and I would go to the Lackawanna library on a Saturday afternoon to get our books. I loved the library, there was not one modern thing about it. It was an old building with high ceilings, hardwood floors and wood panelled walls and shelves that had darkened with age. There was an echo in the library and a wonderful smell of books and an old building. At that time I started reading Barbara Cartland and read her voraciously before passing it on to my sister. I read Leon Uris' Trinity when I was 17 and thus began my lifelong love affair with Ireland and all things Irish. In my last year of high school, I bawled my way through Colleen McCullough's The Thornbirds. But the seminal book of my teenage years would have to have been Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly. I recently reread it and I still love it.

In college I took a course labelled Bestsellers and loved it- got to read Philip Roth, Stephen King, Dashiell Hammett and others.


During the 80's and 90's, I began to 'follow' authors and read everything by Sue Grafton, Paticia Cornwell, Janet Evanovich and Elizabeth George. Anita Shreve, to me, is the best prose writer by far. Her novels, The Weight of Water, Resistance, The Pilot's Wife and Sea Glass still stick with me and the feeling I had when reading those books still resounds with me.

More recently, I read the Pulitzer prize winning, The Hours by Michael Cunningham and could totally relate to Laura Brown, the unhappily married woman who didn't want to be bothered by all things domestic, she just wanted to be left alone to read her book. Months ago, I read Colm Toibin's Brooklyn again could relate to the tale of emigration, homesickness and settling in to one's new life in a foreign country.

I read voraciously and widely. I love the classics, chick lit, young adult, mystery, crime and women's fiction and self help and the list goes on and on. I am addicted to books. Sometimes, I can read 2-3 books in a week. When I was on bedrest for my pregnancy in 2004, I was reading a book in a day and a half.
There have been times that I've picked up a book 3 times in an attempt to read it but failed. But the third time is always the charm and for whatever reason, that book with it's previous failed attempts turns out to be one of the best books that I've ever read. Trinity, The Historian (Elizabeth Kostova) How Green Was My Valley (Richard Llewellyn) come to mind.
There is nothing better than to be pulled to into the pages of a great book and the boundaries between your life and the pages blur and you are right in the midst of it. A good book makes you a silent 'watcher' but a great book makes you a silent 'character.'
As the saying goes, 'so many books, so little time.'