Morbid Romantic

Book Review & Personal Blog

I have decided that I no longer want to post generic, “my week in book” posts for my Sunday Salon. Instead, I am choosing to switch focus a bit and start posting about more meaningful things. I want to write more in-depth, meaningful posts about what reading means to me and why it is my ultimate source of pleasure and leisure.

My love for books began early. My mother was an avid reader and had always been as long as I could remember. When I think about being a child, I imagine my mother with her same bun reading a book. She worked two jobs when I was around seven years old, so I barely got to spend time with her. One night as my sister and I were in bed watching some thriller movie on television, my mother came home from work and poked her head into the room. When seeing that we were awake, she asked, “Do you guys want to read?”

Well, we relished any chance to spend time with our mother, so we agreed. The book that she pulled out was called A Spell For Chameleon by Piers Anthony, which is the first book in his Xanth series. It is an adult fantasy novel, but my mother decided to read it to us, aged seven and eight, just the same. I now know as an adult that she skipped over a great many parts, but my sister and I were so young that we never noticed the strange paths of plot. Instead, we just listened to our mother read, now and then being allowed to read a passage or two out loud on our own. Often times, reading was just a prelude to get together, eat snacks, and talk. My mother was always more than happy to set the book down and just talk to us about our day or girly issues, or anything at all.

We did this for years. We got to book 9 in the series, Golem in the Gears. I’m not sure what happened around this time. Well, I do. Live just got too chaotic and complicated, so we stopped reading together.  However, a few years later, I rediscovered the books and began to read them.  I fell in love with them all over again. Being that I was older, on the cusp of becoming a teenager, I got a lot more out of them. I still have the copies my mother read to me. Yes, all the original ones with their wear and tear. The series if very dear to me. I read the books now and each time appreciate them all the more for their humor and creativity, yet perhaps more so because they are linked in with some of my happy times.  Regardless, I was by then a passionate reader who had hundreds of books.  All I would get for Christmas and birthdays were stacks of books.  My mother would buy me TONS of them even though we hardly had that much money to spend.  She’d save, put a batch on layaway, and eventually be able to buy them.  If I wanted to read, my mother was going to make sure that happened.

What my mother did was foster in me a love of books. What she showed me was the pleasure of it, how a book can become real, how a book can be just the right thing to help you settle in to relax after a long day.

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