The Book Bug

**This is a queued post, while I get back into the routine of being home and try to shake off my jet lag. Enjoy! 

Before I came to New Zealand, I bought myself a new Kindle and used some of my birthday money to buy myself a plethora of new books to stock it up with. 22 and a half hours on a plane, and who knows how much free time once I arrive? THINK OF ALL THE READING TIME.

Naturally, I don't think I picked up kindle once while I was on the place. Or at all during our 3 or 4 days of flight delays.

In fact, I don't really remember doing any reading at all until we stayed in Hastings in November. Bored during our afternoons off work (and desperately needing a distraction from the caravan and the heat), I found myself picking up my kindle and randomly choosing Lolita as my next book.

I couldn't put my kindle down.

I resented going to work, simply because it was detracting from all the time that could be spent reading. I spent whole afternoons sat with my kindle on my lap, devouring a book for what felt like the first time in months.

I spent an evening reading article upon article of analysis of Lolita, feeling excited and inspired for the first time since my final year project. I quickly chose another book to get my teeth into, and found myself delighted to find the burning desire I have always had to read and read and read was still going strong inside. I had missed this!

It seemed it was going to be a short-lived revival with my next two book choices, Mosquitoland and then Les Misérables. It's not that they weren't good books, they just weren't sit-down-and-read-until-you-can't-anymore books. Especially Les Mis. It took me two months to read that book. Not because I didn't enjoy it (you just need to go here to see that that isn't true) but because I kept putting my kindle down when I reached a particularly description heavy part of the book, which wasn't exactly a motivating reason to pick it back up again.

But! when we got our jobs here in Nelson, I found myself with heaps more spare time than I had had in a long time. Actually, better to say heaps more guilt-free time that I felt like I'd had. Living and working in an area changes how you spend your time there, and I suddenly felt a lot less guilty if I spent an afternoon reading instead of going out and sightseeing. It seemed as though the motivation for battling through Les Mis had returned.

And oh! am I glad it did! I finished the book and I loved it. My next book choice was a wise one and I found myself yet again struggling to put my book down. Even being too afraid to read it on my own in the dark didn't stop me, I would just find people to sit amongst so that I could keep reading unafraid (or at least with protection, just in case). For the first time in a long time, I reached the last page and just sat staring into space for a while, processing what I had been through.

The Book Bug had returned.

Since then I have been powering through books (for my new, slow reading speed anyway) and it is AMAZING. Honestly, I am having so much fun reading - it feels like it did before academic English ruined everything (and before being a teenager killed the rest).

I'm keeping track of all my reading progress on my Goodreads account, but I want to write about it here as well. I like being able to look back on books I have read and what I thought about them at the time. Especially because I re-read a lot of books and I find it so interesting to discover how my perspectives and opinions have changed since first picking it up.

I'm going to try and post monthly round ups of the books I'm reading, or bi-monthly or whatever grouping together works for the number I have read. I'm a lot slower at reading than I used to be and my inability to leave a book unread (I am looking at you, War and Peace. It WILL be third time lucky!!) means that I often get stuck for weeks on a book I'm not motivated enough to pick up.

The only other thing I will say is that I can't review books for shit. Not only am I a shit tourist, I am also a shit reviewer. Do not expect anything fancy or of any kind of particular quality - these reviews will literally just be my thoughts on the books I have read, the kind of thing I look for when I read (which I am almost ashamed to say isn't usually symbolism or interesting uses of grammar or anything fancy - it's just a book that I can't put down) and nothing more or less.

I'm excited!