The Subject of Reading

It is very clear that I love books.  I love reading them, I love talking about them, I love sharing them.  I even like looking at them in the book shelves in my home and remembering the stories or things that I learned while reading them.

I like reading all types of books and I read for different reasons at different times.  It was a great accomplishment for me when I got to a point that I could be reading several types of books at the same time and could go from one to another depending on my mood at the time.  For years when my kids were still at home, I read from a BYU list of 500 books that everyone should read. I liked the diversity of that and how it forced me to broaden my learning and reading.

Lately, I have been much more "lazy" in my reading.  Other than religious books which I read from time to time, I have spent my free time reading on mostly science fictions and spy/mystery novels of all types and haven't really tried to expand beyond that.  I can often go to the little library in our front yard and found a new spy book to read and I find them a great break and enjoyable.  Mostly they don't make me think or evaluate my life or encourage me to make changes or any thing else that reading can do.  My work as a therapist already does that for me almost every time I interact with a client or study more about a therapy treatment.  Books have become my escape/recovery from that part of my world.

If you liked the Ender's Game--this is the pre-story!

Robert Ludlum, Tom Clancy, and many more

 A recent religious book I have read--which actually was a combination of religion and mindfulness which is part of my therapeutic practice world.  It is an easy read and I would suggest it to anyone who wants to use stillness in their lives

 A number of years ago, I spend some time (which I posted about in the blog) determining my top "14" books of all time.  They still sit together on a shelf with the addition of a Trixie Belden book that I stumbled upon at a book store one day.  Each of these books made an impression on me which was really tied to the time, place, and age that I read them.

This week I stepped out of my comfort zone for reading and read two books, back to back, which were suggested by my sister.  One of them she had asked me to read over a year ago so "that she could have someone to talk to about it."  The other was a more recent addition to that same list.  I ordered them in March just as the pandemic went into full force and since they weren't "essential," I didn't get them until this past week.

First I read:

This book is written by a therapist about her experience as a therapist and also with her own therapist.  After finishing it, I texted Valerie:

"Just finished Maybe You Should Talk To Someone.  It goes without saying that I loved it.  It captures the backdrop of what a therapist experiences as they engage with clients...the not knowing, the knowing but caution to lead and not push, and the richness of sharing that human experience.  It highlighted the amazing mixture of past experiences, our feelings and thoughts, and our relationships on our present moments and present relationships and our present functioning.  Thanks for telling me about it...and as luck would have it, Educated arrive a couple of hours ago."

And I picked up Educated and finished it by Friday night.

Yes, it is the large print addition.  At the time I ordered
it was the only paperback copy that was available.

We haven't talked about this book yet.  It is the story about a woman who was raised in a very dysfunctional family in rural Idaho who later graduated from BYU and then attended Cambridge and then Harvard (I think). The complexity of life, memories, and how we become who we are as human beings are explored in this book but without clear answers to any of those questions.  History, especially our personal history, is shaped by the lens of our beliefs, our expectations, our hopes and dreams, and our heartaches and pains.  This book made me sad for her and her experiences and even more grateful for my own life experiences which were kinder and gentler with always a clear feeling of love and being loved.

And now, I have moved on to The Professor and the Madman:  The making of the Oxford Dictionary another book exploring the complexities of the human experience.

READING--there is nothing quite like it to help explore the world we live in--externally and internally.  Read a new book this week!