Two Thousand Books

Over the Christmas break I managed to finish reading my 2,000^th book.  It only took me 32 years to read my second 1,000^th.

I cannot imagine my life without the love of reading.  Whether I read for pleasure, knowledge or simply as a soothing retreat from reality I always have a book going by my bedside table.  Books have taken me into the Middle Ages, to the American civil war, to London Tower with Jane Grey, Elizabeth Tudor and the little princes, fighting with the Outlaw of Torn, in the jungle with Tarzan, pioneering with Laura Ingalls, and of course on the journey to Mordor with Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring.  I’ve read steamy novels such as Peyton Place and Valley of the Dolls and I’ve read paperback westerns like Shane and Hondo; I’ve took to Classics like a duck to water with Jane Eyre, Persuasion, The Woman in White, A Tale of Two Cities.  I’ve read every Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Bronte, Dickens, Collins and Gaskell.  Ditto every Christie, Ford and Rinehart.  I still bemoan that Georgette Heyer died without passing on her baton to anyone worthy of her wit (okay Nora Ephron you had your moments).

Ah, now that’s just the fiction.  For years I couldn’t pass up any English or American history volume until at last I had no more shelving for them.  What I don’t know about any civil war general (confederate side) isn’t worth knowing!  I was exposed to the holocaust way too young, not with Anne Frank’s Diary as one might suppose but with Hitler’s Ovens.  I don’t know what my father was thinking when he lent me that book at the age of 16 but I can tell you I lay awake nights terrified of death after reading it.  Recent favorites include Julia Child’s “My Life in France” and “The Art of Being” but early 20^th century American biographies have opened my eyes to an opulence that I see is being outdone by the mega-billionaires of today.

Reading takes me places, lovely, exotic, interesting, horrifying, questioning, wondering.  Oh my but I can go on and on.

Favorite person of all times truly must be Johannes Gutenberg!  Lest we forget.