Darn you guys. Now my To Be Read list is two pages long... Can I be excused? I have to go catch up on my reading.
Don't be ashamed JSK, you're nowhere near behind as I am.
I mostly have been listening to audiobooks over the summer as opposed to reading the old-fashioned way.
It was the only way I could enjoy fiction without feeling the need to be as good as the stories I was hearing.
I don't know how it happened, but there have been long periods of time when I feared reading would never be fun again after trying to look at books instructively for so long.
I now know my love of reading is still in me, it's just fighting to stay alive. I'm starting to read my long back list of books I was too frustrated to read before.
Brevity may make stories better, but that doesn't mean it's easy to achieve, and it doesn't mean it's because of a lack of trying.
All that said, I'm still trying to get back to the joy I felt when I started reading for pleasure in the first place.
I'm sure I'm not the first writer who's had this problem, but sometimes I feel like I'm in a situation no one gets but me.
Maybe because I came to reading for pleasure late in life, I still have to further grow in this area.
I often feel left out when I head about the books people grew up with. I didn't hate reading growing up, and I didn't struggle with it on a developmental level either, but I didn't have books that were touchstones in my life the same way.
Sometimes I fear that because I didn't grow up with a innate love of books as a kid, I can't connect with books the way I want and know I can.
It wasn't until high school that it finally clicked for me, I finally found the books I loved, and still love them today.
Even then, I wasn't reading the hot thought-provoking YA titles either.
The farther away a story was from reality was the kind of reading I loved, and still do.
Sometimes you need to read to escape, and I think that gets lost when we're trying to read with a writer's eye all the time.
There's nothing wrong with using a book to escape. I don't think anyone here would disagree, but sometimes I feel like we adults don't allow ourselves to escape our troubles once in awhile like we might've when we're younger.
I think we'd be less hard on ourselves if we were more honest with ourselves about that.
That said, I can tell from being on AW as long as I have that a lot of you are some of the bravest readers I've ever known. I'm getting there, but I've got a ways to go.