Books, Glorious Books

Besides cooking, the hobby I've been at the longest is reading. My siblings are all a lot older than me, so I was reading long before kindergarten, and I started reading the books they were reading in junior high and high school when I was still in elementary. I've always loved books,especially really old, really fat ones: Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, you get the idea. In my opinion, the best books are over a hundred years old, or at least fifty. That's not to say I don't read the newbies too—Harry Potter, Twilight, A Series of Unfortunate Events—they're fun, they just aren't the best books I've ever read.

What I love in a book is something that takes me to a time or a place that I'm unfamiliar with and makes me feel like I'm there. Or, even better, puts me in the mind of someone completely unlike myself, and makes me see what they see, feel what they feel, think what they think, understand the way they see the world. I try to be non-judgemental, because you never know what a person's experiences have been or why they act the way they do, and I think these kinds of books help me to be more understanding of others. A couple of books that I've read in the last few months are particularly good at this: The Catcher in the Rye and One Flew Over the

Cuckoo's Nest. The characters in these books are far from my sheltered naïve self, but I felt I could still understand where they were coming from.

I especially appreciate books now that I don't have the opportunity to be in school. Another thing I've always loved is learning, and I hope to be able to continue finding out about the world in my own "classroom" built with books rather than bricks. I learned more about the Civil War in two days reading The Killer Angels than in 13 years of school, but my lack of good social science and history teachers is a different story. The point is, now that I have more time on my hands, I'm going to try to start being an avid reader like I used to be before the days of crazy homework and sports and clubs. I'm starting with these—all of the books left in our house that I still haven't ever read: