FOR THE LOVE OF READING

I’ve gone through phases with my reading – sometimes I devour books at an extreme pace, three a week, and sometimes it takes me a full month to read a single book.  This is not a unique experience, nor is my identifying it revolutionary at all.

I’ve been a reader for as far back as I can remember.  My mom always tells the story of me and my sister memorizing one of the Angelina Ballerina books basically as early as we could talk, and I guess I never stopped picking up books.  I used to practically live in the library – I would bring a bag and take home as many books as I was physically allowed to on my library card, only to come back the next week, already having finished those books.  I was lucky enough to grow up in a town that has a really good public library system, and I never found myself wishing for a better selection.  I pretty much never had to reread books (although of course I did, because who doesn’t love rereading books?).

Being someone who read so much at such a young age, especially with all of the adults telling me that I was reading so far above my grade level, I developed a bit of a superiority complex about how well read I was (and let’s be honest, I still have that superiority complex).  That meant that I was reading books at far too young – I remember being in sixth grade reading an adult book that had very adult scenes (I vividly recall reading some of the pages aloud in the locker rooms as me and the other eleven year old girls in my gym class got changed).  I don’t necessarily think that middle schoolers shouldn’t be reading books from the adult section, and I had a very healthy relationship with my parents so I could ask them questions about things I maybe didn’t understand.  However, so much of what I was reading went straight over my head.

I was reading all of these dark and heavy books, and it only got worse as I got into high school.  There’s nothing wrong with dark and heavy books – some of them are my favorites still.  I actually had a conversation with my roommate the other day about how I rarely read happy books (but maybe that’s something to bring up with a therapist, not in a blog post).  The books themselves wasn’t the issue – the issue was the attitude I developed about it.  I suddenly was embarrassed to be reading books with colorful covers, books that could be deemed “childish.”  

But I still liked reading those kinds of books, even if in secret.  I would read them in my room, not bringing them to school with me.  I would get them in eBook form, and I wouldn’t log them on my Goodreads account (or Storygraph, but the time I got to college) for fear of anyone seeing it.  This is the first time I’m admitted aloud that I read all four of the Off Campus series books, the college hockey romance ones.  And why am I so embarrassed to admit that I read all of them?  

Somewhere along the way, my love of reading turned into a love of being well-read.  I still love reading long and pretentious books that explore dark themes, but it’s exhausting to only read those.  It came to a climax when I was in my senior year of college – I could only bring a handful of books with me, since I didn’t have room for everything and I also knew I wasn’t going to be reading that many of them in the short semester, and the books I happened to bring were entirely classics (some modern classics as well).  And I love reading classics, but having my entire physical TBR as hard to read classics did not make me excited to read.

And that brings me to my question – when did reading for me turn from something I did because I enjoyed it into something I did to prove to myself I was better than everyone else?  I’ve recently been reading more “fun” books that are lighthearted or that don’t require too much thought, and those books are just as good as others.  I picked up the first Pretty Little Liars books just for fun a few weeks ago, and I hesitated before adding it as “currently reading” on my Storygraph because I have a few friends who would probably raise an eyebrow at that.  But why should I be ashamed of reading a fun book that I enjoyed when I was a kid?  Just because it’s not necessarily “intellectually stimulating” does not mean it’s not worth reading.

Last week, I had to get an oil change – my very first time going to get one, since this is the first year I’ve ever owned a car.  I knew I would be sitting around at the mechanic’s as I waited for an hour or so, and I went to grab the book I was in the middle of, but stopped.  I was reading Better Off Wed by Laura Durham, a 2005 book with a colorful and campy cover I got out of a little free library about a wedding planner who gets caught up in a murder investigation.  I had so much fun reading it, but I didn’t bring it to the mechanic’s office.  I was already nervous, since it was my first time going and I don’t know much about car stuff, and I didn’t want to stand out even more than I already do as a young woman (who so clearly has no idea what’s going on) by bringing such an unserious book.  I didn’t bring it with me, and instead scrolled on my phone as I waited for my car to be ready.

If I could go back in time and change that visit, I would have just brought the damn book.  I had fun reading it, and I wanted to bring it, and the prospect of shame was what stopped me.  I need to stop getting in my own way – I can’t imagine any one single person at the mechanic’s shop would think less of me for reading a book that wasn’t War and Peace or whatever.  I read for the love of reading, and it’s time I stop being ashamed of reading a young adult book every now and then – especially since so many of these “fun” books are extremely well-written and, well, much more enjoyable to read than those dense classics full of words I have to look up.

I don’t know if I’m the only one that feels this way, but if I’m not alone, my challenge to you is to bring the fun book with you next time you’re in public.  No one is going to judge you for it – speaking from my own experience, I have never once looked at someone and been like, “they’re reading THAT book?” So why am I doing it to myself?  Reading should be fun, and it’s time I started letting myself have fun again instead of hiding the fun books away and only reading them on my phone.

IN DEFENSE OF YA NOVELS

Over the past few days on TikTok, there has been a little bit of discourse surrounding YA novels and whether or not people should be reading them over a certain age. In particular, there was one TikTok where someone essentially said that people over the age of 20 should read “real literature” like Crime and Punishment instead of young adult novels.

I thought this was an interesting TikTok to show up on my for you page recently, since just last weekend, my mom was talking to me and my roommate about book recommendations and she asked my roommate if I recommended “real books” or just YA to her.

I am 21 years old currently, and while I have mostly transitioned to reading adult books, I still enjoy a lot of YA novels. My top genre on Storygraph is currently Young Adult. So I would like to take this moment to push back on the narrative that young adult novels aren’t “real books” or that there is an age maximum for someone to be reading them.

I am under the impression that people should be able to read whatever they want to read without any judgement, including and especially YA novels. Even though they are targeted towards middle and high schoolers normally, that doesn’t mean that those age ranges are the only people who are allowed to read them. Besides, at the age of 21, I’m not really that far removed from the target audience for them.

There are plenty of reasons that someone older might want to read YA novels. One could be for the sake of nostalgia; my parents came to visit last weekend, and when they asked me if I needed them to bring me anything from home, I asked them to bring my copies of The Hunger Games, since I’ve been itching to reread them. I’ve also recently reread the Percy Jackson series in anticipation of the Disney+ show. Rereading these YA books brings me back in time and reminds me of being a kid again, which is something that I really enjoy the feeling of.

Another reason an adult might be reading YA books is simply because sometimes YA books are really good. Just because a book is targeted towards a younger audience doesn’t mean that they are automatically of a lesser quality. Some of my favorite books are part of the YA genre, since they’re really well-written and have compelling plot lines and characters.

I’ve also noticed that YA books tend to be more accessible. By that, I mean that the language is easier to read and they’re not as pretentious. This could be good for people who maybe don’t read that much but want to get more into it; instead of being discouraged by flowery language, they can read a less complex book that’s still well-written and still compelling that could ease them back into reading. YA books are also good for getting out of reading slumps or when you need a fast paced book for whatever reason.

Overall, I think that we as a society need to stop having superiority complexes over the types of books we read and instead just be glad that people are reading. Young adult books are just as much books as the “classics” are, and they’re also more attainable, and they are often more fun.

On an ending note, here’s a list of some of my favorite YA books/series!

• A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder series by Holly Jackson
• The Serpent King by Jeff Zentner
• Truly Devious series by Maureen Johnson
• The Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sepetys
• I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson

WHY I LOVE AUDIOBOOKS

I used to be able to tear through books so quickly, I would be going back to the library day after day to pick up more books.  When I got a little older, I had more things to do, more responsibilities, less time for reading.  I went a few years without really making time to read and prioritizing books in my life, but I was recently (over the past few years) able to change that.  And that is largely due to audiobooks.

I love audiobooks.  I’ve been a big podcast person for the past several years, and I don’t know why I didn’t make the connection sooner that I would also love audiobooks.  At first I think I was afraid that it would be harder for me to pay attention to the book, and that I would miss things by listening to a book instead of physically reading it, but over the past two years, I’ve completely changed my mind.  I don’t necessarily prefer audio over physical (or the other way around), but audiobooks completely changed the reading experience for me.

Audiobooks are great in my opinion because of the possibilities they give me.  I can listen to a book while doing the dishes or cooking dinner, or while cleaning my apartment or going on a walk.  They even come in handy when I’m too lazy to get out of bed and retrieve a physical copy of a book (although more than once I’ve fallen asleep while laying in bed and listening to an audiobook, and I’ve had to spend more time than it was probably worth trying to find the place I had left off).  I can read a book while doing something productive, as long as that task doesn’t require too much brain power, because then I can’t pay attention to both.

Audiobooks are also a great way to experience a book.  I will say it’s a bit of a gamble – if you really like the narrator, that will enhance your experience so much, but if you don’t, it might ruin an otherwise wonderful book.  In my experience, however, audiobook narrators do such a good job (in particular, the narrator for the Diviners series by Libba Bray really enhanced my reading experience because of how many voices she was able to do for all of the different characters – the narrator’s name is January LaVoy and I would highly recommend the audio version of those books!).  I often forget that it’s just one person doing the narration because it’s so easy to get lost in the story, and they transition through the voices so seamlessly.

I also think that audiobooks have gotten very creative with the way they tell stories, especially since it is taking an existing story from print and transitioning it to a completely different medium.  One in particular that I can think that I really enjoyed was the audiobook for The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow (narrated by Gabra Zackman) – the audio version used music in a really cool way that I hadn’t heard used in audiobooks before.  A lot of audiobooks also utilize full casts to tell the story – Sadie by Courtney Summers and A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson are two books that I can think of that really make use of a full cast and it really enhances the story.  I also know that the audiobook version of Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid does the same, and I’ve been meaning to listen to that book ever since I finished reading the physical version.

Of course, there are a couple of downsides to audiobooks.  You can’t go back and highlight or underline passages like you can in a physical book, and sometimes the written medium doesn’t transfer perfectly into audio (for example: a lot of books that have multi-media aspects (think social media posts or something else that is very visual) to them struggle to convey those into an audio format).  But overall, audiobooks are convenient and accessible.  I listen to them through the Libby app on my phone, so not only are they always accessible to me because I always have my phone on me, but they’re also free through my library card (as long as my local library carries the digital audiobook copy).

Overall, I think that audiobooks are convenient and accessible – if you don’t have the time to sit down and read a book, or maybe you don’t think you have the capability of physically reading a large book, it’s always an option to sit down and listen to it.  I love audiobooks, I probably listened to more audiobooks than physically read books last year, and I would sing the praises of audiobooks from the highest mountain.  If you have any audiobooks that you loved, please let me know, because I love the experience of listening to a book told by a really good narrator!

ENJOYING “BAD” BOOKS AND DISLIKING “GOOD” BOOKS

Often, when I finish reading a book and start to write a review, I spend a while listing out everything I didn’t like in a book and everything I thought was dumb or didn’t work. But even more often, I finish this list of things I didn’t like with a high rating or by saying “but I really did enjoy this book!” Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about how it is that I can recognize things that I would subjectively consider “bad” in a book but still like the book and enjoy it.

I’ve found that I do this a lot with contemporary romance books. I don’t have a problem recognizing that sometimes the writing is cheesy and predictable, but I also genuinely enjoy reading the book and even like the book when I finish it.

This can also work the other way – not liking a book that is widely considered “good” – and I think that a lot of this has to do with expectations. If I have seen a book all over TikTok or Instagram with people hyping it up and saying that it’s the best book I’ve ever read, I’m going to go into it with very high expectations. Because of this, I find it really easy to nitpick the book and find things wrong with it, since I was so certain that it was going to be the best book I’ve ever read. With high expectations, it’s easy to dislike a book that everyone else did like.

On the other hand, a lot of times when I’m reading contemporary romance books, I know the staples of the genre and I’m expecting it to be cheesy or even a little silly or stupid. Because I’m going in with lower expectations and knowing what to expect, I’m way more likely to enjoy the book.

An example of this is a book that I’m currently reading: The Ex Hex by Erin Sterling. When I was scrolling through some of the reviews on StoryGraph, I noticed that there’s two distinct ways of reviewing it: people either rate it very highly or very low. All of the reviews that rate it low talk about how it’s silly or cheesy, almost like they were rating it low just because it wasn’t “high brow literature.” This is a thought that I would like to push back on. The book is obviously supposed to be a little silly; it’s about a witch who jokingly puts a curse on her ex and then the curse causes issues nine years later when they’re reunited. There’s tarot cards and spells and ghosts and a talking cat. It’s a book that doesn’t really take itself seriously, that’s what makes it fun.

An example of this on the other side of things is the book The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller. Now, I really liked this book, I did. But TikTok had me convinced that this book was going to be the most beautiful book I’ve ever read and that I would bawl like a baby by the end. Neither of those things ended up coming true. I genuinely think that if I had gone into the book not expecting to cry and for it to “change my life,” then I probably either would have or I would have at least liked it a little better.

All in all, I think that a lot of the reasons why we enjoy bad books or dislike good books is due to managing expectations. I also think that this idea is so important when it comes to books such as contemporary romance books; society has a tendency to see them as “bad” because they aren’t high-brow literature or literary in any way. But not everything we read and enjoy has to be objectively “good;” we can find a book good that other people didn’t like, and we can dislike a book that everyone else loved. I feel like with social media nowadays, people try to push the agenda that there is a “correct” opinion about a certain book. But this shouldn’t be the case.

What “bad” books did you enjoy? What “good” books did you not? Let me know in the comments!

READING MORE DURING THE SEMESTER

Over winter break, when I had absolutely no obligations and nowhere to be, I would sit on the couch and absolutely devour books, often in one or two sittings, often one a day. According to my Storygraph account, I read a whopping 20 books just over the month that I was home, which is absolutely ridiculous.

However, this week marks the beginning of the spring semester for me, and with that comes less time to read, since I can’t just sit on the couch for hours on end and lose myself in a book. Now I have homework to do, papers to write, classes to go to, and other campus obligations, such as my on-campus job.

Along with the minimized time that I have during the semester, another difference in my ability to read during break vs. during the semester comes with my access to books. At home, I have all of the books I own, all the books my siblings own, and all the books my parents own (and my dad owns a lot of books), as well as books from the public library by my house. However, since I fly to and from school, I try not to take too many books with me. So at school, I tend to only have access to the books I buy for class and the audiobooks I can get through the Libby app. I don’t have a car or a permanent address by the library in the town I go to school in, so the public library by me isn’t an option, and my campus library tends to only stock academic books and books people need for class, so it doesn’t tend to have the types of books that I’m looking for.

Despite this, I want to keep the momentum of reading that I gained over winter break (although obviously not quite the same quantity), so I’ve found myself needing to find other ways to continue to read books. Here is a list of the ways I intend to read more over the semester despite limited time and limited access to books:

• Continue to listen to audiobooks!

This one is something I’ve been doing since last year, but it’s still a great way to read when you don’t feel like you have the time. It’s so easy to put an audiobook on when you’re walking to class, getting ready in the morning, cooking meals, etc., and it makes doing things like cleaning or folding laundry much more interesting.

• Utilize the digital versions of books more!

I’ve tended to shy away from digital books in the past, since the only way I have to read them is my phone, but I’m going to make an effort to try this a little more. I always have my phone on me, so this is a way to both get access to more books as well utilize time efficiently to read even if I don’t have a physical book with me.

• Ask friends to borrow books!

Some of my friends are also big readers like me, and I imagine that they have to have some books with the that I’ve never read that I could borrow from them. This is a great way to get access to more books – especially books that I wouldn’t normally read – without needing to buy them or find room for them in your suitcase.

• Use the school library!

I know I just said that my school library tends to only have academic books or books for people’s classes, but I’ve never actually spent a substantial amount of time looking through what these books are. If I’m lucky, maybe some of these books will sound interesting and I’ll be able to check them out and read them during the semester.

• Don’t be too hard on yourself if you don’t read all that much.

The semester can get busy with other commitments very easily, so I just want to remind myself (and you!) that it’s okay if you don’t read all that much! Especially if you have to read a lot for classes, when you finish that reading, your first thought might not be to go read something else. Even if it’s reading for class vs. reading for pleasure, sometimes I don’t feel like reading after all the reading I have to do for class, and that’s okay! Take a break, watch some TV, hang out with friends, and only read if you’re going to enjoy it. Don’t be too hard on yourself; it shouldn’t be a competition for how much you can read.

These are my tips on how to read a little more during the semester without feeling too burnt out or letting the semester get the best of you. If you have any other suggestions, please let me know in the comments! Happy semester, and happy reading!

DON’T READ A LITTLE LIFE

I have never considered myself a particularly rebellious person, but when I saw people on TikTok talking about this book and they were saying “I cannot in good conscious recommend this book,” my curiosity peaked, and I decided to go against what everyone was saying and read it for myself. And not to sound like an echo chamber of everyone on TikTok, but now that I have read it, I would like to say: don’t read A Little Life.

When I say this, I don’t by any means think that this was a bad book. On the contrary, I think that this was an incredibly well written book – the narrative is expertly crafted, the characters are all rich and well developed, and the writing itself was very pretty and well done. After this entire paragraph listing off all the good things about this book, you might be asking yourself: well, why shouldn’t I read this?

This book is traumatizing as hell. As I read it, I felt like it was just one terrible thing after another, especially to Jude; every turn of the page felt like a punch to the gut. I think that one of the reasons why this was so painful to read was because of how rich the character descriptions were; I got attached to the characters as I read the first part, so by the time I got further into the book, it was just that much more painful to read about these terrible things happening to these characters.

When people on the internet describe this book as having “every single trigger warning imaginable,” they are not kidding. I can’t think of a single horrible thing that isn’t included in this book. And while it made for an absolutely heartbreaking book that definitely made me feel a lot of things (which is often what I want in a book), in this case, it was a little bit too much. I almost stopped reading this book so many times because I didn’t think that I could handle any more of it, and I almost wish that I had. Instead, I chose to stay up until almost 3am finishing a huge chunk of it, and then proceeded to stay up even longer than that, first because I was crying about the ending of the book, and second because I needed some time to process what it was that I had just read.

Am I glad that I read this book? I guess I am. But do I regret reading this book? A little bit, I think. When I was about three quarters of the way through the book, I found myself questioning what the point of this book was; to me, the point seemed to be to just smack the reader with every terrible thing imaginable with the hope that people will cry about it and then talk about it. And I guess it worked, but, as I said before, it was just way too much at once.

And maybe I’m coming from a place of privilege; I have not experienced even a fraction of what Jude experiences, so maybe I’m just too soft to handle a book like this. But if you have experienced things that Jude has experienced, I imagine that it’s also way too much for you to handle because it would be incredibly triggering. Which begs the question: who is this book for? Who is the intended audience of this book that wouldn’t be incredibly overwhelmed by the premise and details of this book?

And maybe I’m completely missing the point of this book. Maybe the point is that it’s as traumatizing and horrible as it could possibly be to try to make it stick with the readers. And it has definitely stuck with me, but I would say in an overwhelmingly negative way.

The title of this post is: Don’t read A Little Life. But I know that I am in no position of authority to prohibit you from reading this book. You absolutely are under no obligation to follow my advice. But if you are on the fence about reading this book, this is my advice. And if I can’t convince you at all, and you’re planning on reading it anyway, just proceed with caution and look up all the trigger warnings beforehand to know exactly what you’re getting into.

If you’ve read A Little Life and have a different stance on it, please let me know in the comments! I would love to hear another perspective from people who recommend this book to other people; maybe I’m just getting the wrong message from it. Or if you haven’t but want to, please let me know what the draw of this book for you personally is in the comments! The conversation surrounding this book is so interesting to me, and I would love to hear from all sides.

And, once again, if you’re planning on reading this book: PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

BOOKSHELF TOUR

I haven’t had that many books in my room at school for a while, so I’ve normally just stacked them all on my dresser, but this semester, I’ve somehow been accumulating more and more books, so that I can’t fit them all on my dresser anymore. I recently got a new bookshelf – one of those four cube organizers from Target – and I admittedly had way too much fun organizing all my books onto it. I thought it would be fun to go through the sections of books I had and show you what books I have!

I don’t have that many books, around twenty or so, since most of them are at my childhood bedroom back in my hometown, but these are the ones I’ve either brought to school or have gotten while at school.

I’ve split it into three categories: books for class, books for my senior thesis, and books for fun. I also have one cube that’s currently empty, but I think that just means that I need to buy more books! Or wait until next semester when I’ll need to have more books for class.

Books for Class

I’m not going to list all of them, just the ones that might be a little interesting. Which means that I’m going to skip over some of the political textbooks and religious texts that I have.

• The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende
  I had to read this book for my Latin American Politics class, and I ended up really liking it! We looked at it through the Chilean politics lens, but there are so many other ways to read it that are just as interesting and just as good.

• Every Jane Austen book.
  Can you tell that I’m in a class that’s completely Jane Austen themed? So far, I’ve read Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park, leaving us only with Emma and Persuasion, which I’m looking forward to reading! After I’ve finished reading all of them, I think I’ll make a whole post ranking them and giving my thoughts on them!

Books for Thesis

Some of these books are incredibly boring and conceptual, so I won’t go through all of these either. I’m writing my thesis on letters, so there’s a lot of book about communication or letters in there.

• Dracula by Bram Stoker
  I read this book for the first time for my thesis, and I actually really liked it! It wasn’t exactly what I was expecting it to be (I was expecting a little more spookiness and a little more action), but I enjoyed it nonetheless!

• Vox by Nicholson Baker
  This book takes place over the course of one phone call, and it’s really interestingly done. I had also never read this one before, and it ended up working out really well for what my thesis is! It is very explicit, however, so proceed with caution!

• Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney
  I love this book! You can read my review of it here, but also know that my opinion has changed a little more towards the positive since rereading it!

Books for Fun

This shelf includes my journals as well, but it also has books that I’ve bought for various reasons, most of which I haven’t had the chance to read yet.

• Normal People by Sally Rooney
  I bought this for a train ride and read it all in one sitting. It’s so good, and now I can proudly display it on my bookshelf.

• Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
  This is the book that I’m currently reading, and while it’s slow going (I tend to not read physical books as much when I’m in school), I’m really enjoying it so far!

• Beloved by Toni Morrison
  I’ve never read anything by Toni Morrison before, and the bookstore was having a buy two get one free sale, so I bought this one along with Kafka on the Shore and Normal People, and I’m looking forward to getting to read it soon!

• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
  I bought this book at a thrift store for 50 cents, and I’m really looking forward to reading it! My friend really liked it, so I have high hopes for it that I’m sure will be met.

There you have it! The bookshelf in my bedroom at school. This is a little different than the posts I normally write, but I really enjoy seeing what books other people own, so I figured I’d give you some insight into which ones I like enough to own and/or am required to own for my classes.

Have you read any of these books? What books did you like enough to buy? Let me know in the comments!

WHY DO CLASSICS FEEL SO UNATTAINABLE?

I’m an English major in college, so I feel like I’ve read a lot of classics. Even if I wasn’t an English major, everyone reads classics in high school; Frankenstein, some of Shakespeare’s plays, Wuthering Heights, and the Grapes of Wrath are all books that I read in either middle school or high school. But it wasn’t until recently that I started to read classics for fun, not because I had to for class. Just this past week, I read Lolita and The Alchemist, which are books that I would have never thought to read for fun until recently.

But what is it that makes classics feel so unattainable, and that makes so many of us choose a different, more contemporary book over a classic?

One thing is the writing. I understand that people like Dickens are celebrated as the best writers of all time, but when I read Great Expectations and Bleak House, which are the only books by Charles Dickens that I’ve ever read, it feels so hard to understand what is going on. All of the action seems to be hidden between flowery, seemingly unnecessary descriptions that I find myself having to reread sections just to see if anything happened. When I was reading Bleak House for class, this was such a problem for me that, during class discussion, I realized that I had completely missed a character dying. Personally, I find myself gravitating towards a contemporary book over a classic book when I want a lighter read so that I don’t have to puzzle through the plot.

Another reason that classics tend to feel unattainable is the dialogue and the fact that we as a society aren’t used to hearing people talk the same way that they did during the time that these classics were written. Maybe people talked that way back then, but we’ve evolved and changed into a more casual way of talking, so sometimes, reading some of these conversations, I have absolutely no idea what they’re saying or what they’re talking about.

But perhaps the biggest deterrence from reading classics is the type of people who read classics. A lot of the time, people who read classics love to make it known that they read classics, and they build a sort of superiority complex around the fact that they can read these books and don’t run into the problems that I’ve explained above. Even I’ll admit that one of the reasons I decided to start reading more classics was just so I could be able to say, “I’ve read that book!” about them and feel proud of myself for reading them. But some people take it too far, and with the superiority complex and attitude that they have surrounding these books, they – knowingly or unknowingly – discourage other people from reading them.

But, as someone who was too scared to read classics for so long because of these reasons and because of these types of people, I am here to tell you that classics are not as unattainable as you think they are! For me personally, they took a little while to get used to; the first one that I read outside of class took me a really long time to get through. But now that I’ve begun to read more, I’ve found that they’re easier to get through and just to understand in general.

My favorite classics that I’ve read are:

• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scot Fitzgerald

• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

• Emma by Jane Austen

And (not that anyone asked, but) my least favorite classics that I’ve read are:

• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

• Bleak House by Charles Dickens

• The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

What are your thoughts on classic books? Do you like them, or do you tend to shy away from them? What are you favorite and/or least favorite classics? Let me know in the comments!

HAPPY 1 YEAR, TWIN SPEAKS!

On April 11, 2020, my sister and I decided that we wanted to do something fun with our time instead of just sitting in our childhood bedrooms thinking about the pandemic.  We love reading and we love talking about books, and it made sense to start a book blog where we could talk about books with other people who loved them just as much as us.  A year later, Twin Speaks is still going strong, and we’ve made over a hundred posts talking about books.

Over the past year, I’ve read more than I have in a long time.  Perhaps that was because of the pandemic and the fact that I had more time to read than I’ve had since probably middle school, but I’d like to think it was because I’ve surrounded myself with books and the books I love for the past year.  Without this blog, I probably wouldn’t have read half as much as I currently am, and I probably wouldn’t have even heard of some of the books I’ve fell in love with this year. 

A lot has changed over the past year, and a lot has stayed the same.  Our blog posts have stayed pretty similar: book reviews, lists, some discussions about things we liked or disliked in books.  The world has changed in some aspects but stayed the same in some: COVID is still a huge presence looming over us, but I’ve gotten my first vaccination shot (god bless the fact that my college vaccinates us on campus).  Who knows what will happen in another year, but I’m looking forward to another year of blogging and another year of reading!

Thank you all for joining us on this journey and for reading our posts and interacting with us!  It makes my day every time I get a like or a comment or a follow, and I’m so excited at how many wonderful comments and interactions I’ve had over the last year of blogging.  Here’s to another year of connecting over books!

April 2021 begins our second year of Twin Speaks, and we hope it’ll be even more fun and even more rewarding than the first year!  Let us know if you have any ideas for content you’d like from us, whether it’s books you want us to read or just things you want to hear from us!  We’d love to hear from you, so what’s been your favorite thing about the last year?  It seems as though it’s been overwhelmingly bad, but there’s almost always a silver lining.

Thank you for being here with us to celebrate one year of Twin Speaks!  Here’s to many more years to come.

WHY I ALWAYS FIND MYSELF REREADING BOOKS

I have always been the type to reread books again and again.  When I was in elementary school and middle school, I’m sure I read the Harry Potter series upwards of thirty times – every time I would finish reading the seventh book, I would turn right around and pick the first one up again.  There was a certain comfort that came with rereading a book in which I knew exactly what would happen next.  And being a fast reader when I was younger, there was always something, whether a miniscule detail or a certain line of dialogue, that I missed the first time (or the ten times I had read the book before).

Sometimes I fall into a bit of a rut – there are so many good books out there that I haven’t read yet that I know I’ll love, but I can’t bring myself to read them because I keep turning to books I’ve read before.  And it’s never just any book I’ve read before: it’s usually a book I read when I was younger, in middle school or early high school.  For some reason, I always lean back on books I read when I was younger (so often books written for younger readers) because of the comfort it brings me.

I’ve heard a lot that people use reading as a form of escapism, and I have to think that my tendency to reread books is just an extension of that.  Not only do I want to escape, but I want to escape to a place that I’ve been to before.  I’d rather reread the Percy Jackson books than find a new world to enter that I’ve never been to before and don’t know if I’ll like.  I think in a way I’ve always been like that.  When I was a kid, around ten years old, any time I got scared of anything or even just remotely sad, I would always reread Matilda by Roald Dahl.  It seems like it’s gotten worse as time has gone by.  Now that I’m older, I should be branching out into more books I haven’t read before, but instead I keep turning back to the books I’ve read a hundred times before when I was in middle school.

This has only recently started to bother me – why is it I always turn to old books that I’ve worn down the spine on instead of exploring the hundreds of thousands of books I haven’t read yet?  I can understand having comfort reads, or turning back to my favorite books, but it’s even worse than that.  I constantly find myself rereading books that I didn’t even like the first time, or a book that I enjoyed reading but knew wasn’t very good (I’m currently rereading The Selection, a book I gave two stars on Goodreads, just for an example).  Is it the comfort of reading a book that I’ve already read?  But why am I finding comfort in reading a book I didn’t even like in the first place?

Rereading books is not a bad thing – I enjoy it often.  Rereading a book means I don’t have to be invested in the worldbuilding or the characterization because I’ve already read the book before.  I wonder if the reason why I like to reread books from my childhood so much, even ones that I didn’t like very much, is because they’ve been around so long that reading them is such second nature.  Reading a book that I read a while ago, even one that I didn’t like, is like a mental break.  And it feels more productive than scrolling on social media.  I don’t have to do much thinking, I don’t have to fully invest myself into the book, but I still get to do something I enjoy a lot.  These guilty pleasure books from when I was in middle school, especially ones that I liked the first time and only on the second or third time did I realize that it wasn’t as good as I originally thought, are so familiar to me that it’s not only comforting, but it’s like taking a break.

Recently I’ve been having to force myself to read new books.  Back to back these past few weeks I’ve read three books that I’ve already read before, and I even extended a hold on a new book just so I could listen to the audiobook of a book I loved when I was younger.  Maybe I’m escaping to the comfort that rereading brings me, maybe I’m taking a mental break, or maybe this is my way of reminiscing on my childhood years.

Do you reread books as often as I do?