Reading Again

One of the things that I haven't done a lot in my life is read.  It's not that I don't like reading.  I used to.  It's just a lot harder to find something that I like that I tend to not waste my time with it.

When I was a young kid, I read a little bit.  I think that Pizza Hut book club thing was one of the few things that got me reading.  Give a kid a pizza, he'll ready for a few weeks. 

Then they started doing book reports, which killed all interest I had in reading.  Hey, you should read, so we're going to make you do a report on what you read so we know you did it.  Sounds fun, right?  Nope!

Book reports killed reading for me for the most part.  I had a book in sixth grade that was on Earnest Hemingway that even after three quarters I hadn't finished.  I don't even think I got through the first few chapters.  I never did a book report on it.  I took the F.  I hated it.

Now, there was a series of books that I found that I liked in seventh grade about dragons that were able to talk to people.  It was your typical young adult series, but I enjoyed it.  I actually bought the series and I think I finished all of them.  I'm not sure, but they're somewhere at home.

There was also a series about time traveling back to when dinosaurs were alive, but they were smart dinosaurs with spears and such.  The first book was called Dinosaur World.  I ended up reading those on my own, and couldn't find the rest of the books to buy because they weren't in stores anymore.  I wrote the publisher asking if they knew of any place to get the books and instead of just getting a letter back from the publisher I received the entire series of books and a letter from the author thanking me for the passion I had for his series.  Was a cool thing.

But then highschool came around and back to the book reports.  I tried to go through the Lord of the Rings books, but couldn't get through any of them.  So I did what any smart person would do.  I read the synopsis of the first two LoTR books and wrote my reports off of those.  The next few books I read were around 150 pages so I was able to get through those and actually enjoyed them more.

Since then I haven't read a lot.  I've read manga now and then, but that's kind of just picture books for older people.  I do enjoy them though, and have gone through a few series.

The past few months I've started ready self help books and haven't gotten through most, but have learned a few things.  There are some that I will go back to and get through at some point.  I have also bought a fair amount of books since I own a Kindle, although I find it harder to get through those books because I don't have an actual page count.

I've also bough the first three Nikki Heat books from the show Castle and am reading the first one now.  Actually not that bad since the characters in the book relate to those on the show, so while the names may be different I still place the actors in their place.

I hope to keep going with reading as I'm finding that I still enjoy it now that i don't have to worry about it being for work, except for maybe some self improvement.  I also wonder if I still have the "issue" that I used to have where I tend to zone out in a book.  Me and my mom always had the issue where we'd start reading and zone out only to come back to find ourselves chapters ahead remembering nothing as the story in our head played itself out.  Fun times.