"Here're Your BOOKS..."

I just wanna talk about books. It's not gonna be a good post. Sorry.

I've been reading a bunch lately. Because I want to (now that I don't have to) and I have time to do it!! It's so nice.

You know how in You've Got Mail Kathleen says that when you read a book as a kid, it becomes a part of you in a way that nothing else does...? I'm here to say that is true. Someone once asked me to name the most influential authors in my life, and every one I listed had written my favorite books when I was a child and a tween.

These were my favorites growing up:

• The Boxcar Children series by Gertrude Chandler Warner
• The Boys Start the War series and the Alice series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
• The Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery
• The Little House on the Prairie series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• The Snob Squad series (I remember crying I was laughing so hard) and Define Normal by Julie Anne Peters
• Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys books
• A Little Princess and The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
• The Ramona and Beezus series by Beverly Cleary
• and the list goes on and on....

I also admit to scaring myself out of my wits reading Mary Higgins Clark. I'd read under the covers with a flashlight, I was so terrified. Looking back, it probably was a bad idea for a twelve-year-old girl with a huge imagination to read those books. No, not probably. It was.

Now that I'm "all grown up," I read three specific books every year. I've done so for the past four years or so. They are... To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine. They're my favorites. I never get tired of them. Sometimes, I think I should read something more obscure, you know, just so I'm cool and stuff, and then I think, "Nah. I love what I love." And I do.

Since I graduated about five weeks ago, I've read the first two of my favorites, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, and I'm about to embark on a reading journey consisting of McCarthy's The Road and Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible. I renewed my library card, so I anticipate a lot of movie-watching and a lot of book-reading. I figure, if I spend all my time doing that, I won't remember to eat, and if I don't eat, then I won't have to spend money on food.

Unhealthy? Perhaps. But very thrifty.