The Reading Nook
Have book will travel. This is the summer of moving. We moved in June (literally the day after the last day of school) from our home of 11 years to a friend’s home for 7 weeks, and next week we will be moving to a new place that we will live in for one year as caretakers while the homeowners are away on sabbatical in an exotic country. It is an outstanding opportunity, and one for which we are grateful. Our children have been bold adventurers, taking all the vexing living situations (boys sharing one bed, as an example) in stride with not much more than momentary crankiness and the sometimes quietly uttered wish for a European trip or even just a plane ride.
And what have we done with our found time in this first new place? Well, visit a library of course. Nothing could steer us off track from the essential library visits during the summer. The thought of reading material for FREE is something I have never been able to get over. All the world’s information out there for the borrowing. I was enchanted as a child, and I still am. Of all the memories of my (not really great) grandfather, the one that stands out the most is of him sitting in the crook of a couch reading, reading, reading. A stack of books piled high next to him. He would read a book a day and power through 7-10 books in a week. This was excellent modeling. My mother also had this drive to read, and so I picked it up too (quite happily). Even though I continue this modeling for my sons, each person’s reading journey is his/her own. We will see what becomes of our son’s reading habits. Right now for them it is “Middle School: Get Me Out of Here!” (James Patterson) for Son #1, and Son #2 has just discovered “Goosebumps”, and though it is slightly out of his range, he is quite happy to nibble through what he does understand. And, yes, we still read aloud to our children. It is FUN!
As for me, I have a stack of books by my bedside and another stack of books on my Kindle all ready for me to devour, and this my second day of vacation leaves me wondering which book will draw me in. I have previewed Beautiful Ruins and am intrigued though many have said it is not what it presents itself to be. I have read half of The Wave, a non-fiction exploration of the power of rogue waves and what they mean for extreme surfers, scientists, and us in this day of climate change, but have lost momentum with it. I know this is a terrible reading habit: reading bits of 5-10 books at once. Bad form, but I have never been able to kick that habit. I guess it kind of works for me.
Other books that await my feasting you can see in this image (below), and the two that are calling to me as a main course are Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness and Graham Robb’s The Discovery of Middle Earth (about mapping the ‘lost world of the Celts’). I am looking forward to the rest of our (moving) vacation. We will see what kind of reading nook I will create at this second home.
Enjoy the meal of summer reads. Next up? Who knows…
Bridget Kelley-Lossada 
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