Reading...

The thing about reading is that it is entirely subjective. Some people like certain books, some people like others. Sometimes a bunch of people like the same books, and sometimes only a few like them.

I guess my point is that we all have different tastes. If you're lucky, you find friends who like the same books you like and can make recommendations about new ones. Or you just poke around Goodreads or Amazon (or your local library) and see what you can find.

I've taken to writing reviews of the books I read, posting them on Goodreads and on Amazon.com. At Amazon, I sometimes get responses from people - readers of my reviews can click a button saying whether my review was helpful or not, and can also comment on my review.

So I left a fairly negative review of one book (Three Cups of Tea), and got an interesting comment in return saying, "What were you reading??? You missed the whole point of this book."

Did I? Did I really?

I suppose my point is that books rarely (if ever) appeal to every single person that reads them. Books can be worldwide bestsellers, and people still pick them up and go, "eh" or "ugh". What some people don't realize is that these are valid responses to books. There's a reason why there's a wide variety of books out in the world... it's because there's a wide variety of people.

I was more amused than offended at the shock and horror of the person who commented on my review. They are certainly entitled to their opinion regarding the book... but I'm also entitled to mine. While I posted a pretty calm response, my general attitude was: hey, calm down... it's not a competition, and I'm not denigrating your choice of books just because I didn't like it.

To revise a famous quote: Read and let read.

by e.e. cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

And time passes...

So it's been two months this time since I posted. Whoops. I have the best of intentions and then it all just slips by the wayside, even after I lost the good excuses of finals, marriage and honeymoon. Ah well, it's been a somewhat busy summer.

I keep trying to pretend that I'm going to read ahead for fall, and while I may manage it yet, right now my focus is mostly on reading all those books for pleasure that I didn't get to read over the school year. As my Good Reads account shows, I've been plowing through a lot of books lately, and enjoying most of them. There's just something about summer that makes me want to read, and I've been happily obliging my craving. Lately it's been murder mysteries and young adult fiction, all of which are light enough reading to make me race through them.

I have been getting rid of a lot of books, though. I think the realization that Shannon and I will be moving every few years to a new parish has woken me to the fact that I really need to pare down my books to the essentials that I simply can't get rid of. The rest of them are being taken to Half-Price Books for a paltry profit. But at least it's something. At first it felt strange, to sell my books and not have them sitting on my shelves, but I picked books that I wouldn't miss, and sure enough, I don't even notice they're gone. I'm not only selling books that I don't want anymore, but also selling off some after I read them. Since I'm trying to work my way through all the books on my shelves that I haven't read, I've decided that if I don't love them and won't want to read them again and again, then I'm not going to keep them. I just don't have the time or energy to keep moving these books from place to place when I don't like them, or if I'm never going to bother to crack them open again.

Before anyone panics, though, let me assure you that there are still lots of books that I love and am holding onto, much to Shannon's wry dismay. But maybe I'll be ruthless enough that when we leave Kentucky after we graduate, I'll only have a few hundred books left to move...