My Return to Reading (Long May it Last)

As I have written before, in my childhood I read books the way a chain smoker smokes cigarettes as my mother recently expressed it. 

This dropped off to almost nothing during my one year of on-campus university. Then during my time in a convent I read at least 15 mins every day which gets one through a surprising amount of books. After the convent while working full time I felt too tired to read and during my three years overseas didn’t have the space to carry books, although I did manage to read Austen again, War and Peace and Chesterton’s fiction on my phone. The tube is a great place to read.

In the past week or so I feel that I have been restored to the status of reader. I had resolved on my return to New Zealand to make use of my family’s large collection of books and the local library to get back into reading and for the past couple of months started a book here and there but nothing had held me to the end. 

Then I was lent a couple of books: a nice short young adult book Holes which runs two cleverly interconnected stories throughout and came with recommendations from the lenders, and a lengthier dystopian end of the world Father Elijah, An Apocalypse by an author who interests me as his thoughts provoke thought if not always agreement in me. Within two weeks they were finished and I moved onto an as yet unread Cynthia Voigt (yes more of the young adult fiction) and have now moved on to a detective fiction series I had not heard of till recently, the Father Dowling Mysteries. 

I have high hopes that this new chain of books will continue as the more I read the better I will write and think and hopefully be.