Good Reads

I love books. I love everything about them. I love the feel of them in my hands, especially when they're well worn. A well loved book with a broken spine, all taped up is a beautiful thing. The more they are passed on from person to person, their covers becoming all bent and dogeared, the more character they seem to have. You can always tell how good a book is by the number of lives it seems to have lived. When I go into libraries I breath in deeply. The smell of old books reminds me of a comforting place I've returned to. I like to run my fingers over the spines as I walk down the aisles looking for a particular one. If I could chose a perfect space, it would have piles of old and ancient books and big waxy candles. Windows are completely optional.

Despite this romatized love of books and reading, I don't do as much of it as I would like. During the day there seems to be so many places to go or things to do. When there is a small window of oportunity, that window is quickly closed with requests for apple juice and snacks. It makes it very difficult to really get into what you're reading. At the end of the day, once all the loose ends are delt with, there isn't a lot of time either. Quite likely I would fall asleep before I got to the third page. Recently, however, I've found an opportunity to get a bit of reading in. Ballet!

My three year old LOVES ballet. She dances around the house all the time wanting to show me her "cool moves".  We signed her up for Twinkle Toes once a week, which is a kind of pre-ballet class given through the city. For forty five minutes the parents wait in the hallway while their kids dance. That's forty five minutes of no one asking me for something. Forty five minutes where I'm awake enough that there's no danger of me falling asleep mid page. Forty five minutes where I can actually read a book again. I have a lot of them to get through. I have many books that I was given, borrowed or bought that have accumulated on my night stand. So I'm blowing off the dust, finally, and working my way through them one at a time.

The first book I'm reading is Life of Pi by Yann Martel. Here is a brief description I found on Amazon:

The son of a zookeeper, Pi Patel has an encyclopedic knowledge of animal behavior and a fervent love of stories. When Pi is sixteen, his family emigrates from India to North America aboard a Japanese cargo ship, along with their zoo animals bound for new homes.

The ship sinks. Pi finds himself alone in a lifeboat, his only companions a hyena, an orangutan, a wounded zebra, and Richard Parker, a 450-pound Bengal tiger. Soon the tiger has dispatched all but Pi, whose fear, knowledge, and cunning allow him to coexist with Richard Parker for 227 days while lost at sea. When they finally reach the coast of Mexico, Richard Parker flees to the jungle, never to be seen again. The Japanese authorities who interrogate Pi refuse to believe his story and press him to tell them "the truth." After hours of coercion, Pi tells a second story, a story much less fantastical, much more conventional--but is it more true?

As it turns out, it is also being made into a movie to be released December of 2012. Hopefully it will be release before the 21st, just in case the whole Myan Calender End Of The World thing is right. I've been wanting to read this book for a while and have even given it as a gift. I'll let you know if I recomend it. In the meantime, I'd love to know what are some of your favorite books? I'm always looking for new ones fill my nightstand with.