Friday means I get to read all weekend....Books, love them, gotta have them, can't live without them....

I grew up reading. 

Reading is like breathing to me. I cannot live without reading. People at the library always know me no whatever where I live because I am there at least every week or so. 

My parents did not get a TV into our house until I had left home, so even though I am a Baby Boomer, I did not see many of the tv shows that my fellow boomers grew up on. Many tv shows I saw for the first time when they were re-runs after I was married. When my husband and I were newly married, I fell in love with James T. Kirk and watched all the re-running episodes of Star Trek that came on every day at 5:00 pm when I came home from work. That would have been in the mid-70's. 

So instead of TV, I read. In the long winter evenings in the frozen north, we read out loud to each other. Classics like Old Yeller and Little Women came alive as my mother read a chapter to us every night before we went to bed, and we often could hardly wait until the next evening for the next installment. My younger sister and brother are big readers too. 

On Friday afternoons I came home from school, elementary and high school to a spotless house. Friday was my mom's cleaning day and she kept a very clean house. I would grab an apple and whatever book I was reading, and sit in my little corner in the living room where the sun was shining and I would revel in the experience. Bliss.......

My parents would say that if they could not find me, they only had to look for a book and my nose would be in it. My maternal grandparents lived only a block away and I was grandpa's favorite. When I went to the library I would pick out travel books that we could read together, and we pored over many a book about Mexico (his favorite) or Africa (my favorite). I sat with him at his handmade rolltop desk top, and we would look through the pictures of exotic places and talk about how we would like to visit those places. 

Luckily I married a reader. My husband reads differently than me, but we enjoy many of the same books, especially about travel. I also love mysteries - not the blood and gore kind, but the police procedural novels that talk more about how the detectives solve the mystery than how the crime was committed. Henning Mankell is a great writer, and got me hooked on Swedish and then Scandanavian mystery writers - that was after I had read all of the Inspector Wexford novels by Ruth Rendell, and the Inspector Morse and on and on.... My big love are the books that tell another person's travel experience. So many writers excite me about the places they have been and give me a little hollow feeling inside that can only be filled by planning another adventure. 

I have about 6 books just waiting for me on my beside table. I can hardly wait.

This should be fun.....more on reading to come.