Who am I?? – Reader

Not that any of you want to know more about my childhood or anything, but I wasn’t a reader as a child.  I didn’t like to read as a pre-teen (we were NOT called Tweens back then!), and I certainly didn’t read as a teenager!!

Ready for a confession (I hope none of my teachers from high school are reading this)?? I NEVER read a single book in Jr High or High School that was assigned to me.  The reason this might be a surprise is because I graduated high school nearly with a 4.0.  I only had 2-3 B’s from 9th-12th grade.  I was good at research, even back then, and I probably spent as much time reading ABOUT the assigned book than I would’ve spent reading the actual book.  It was like a matter of principle that I wasn’t going to read the book.  I wasn’t a rebel at all as a teenager, and I still follow rules like crazy, but for some reason, I just didn’t want to read books.  Not any books… My best friend read Gone With the Wind and those types of things in school… and she definitely read everything we were assigned in class.  She DID graduate with a 4.0, so maybe that would’ve made a difference for me! 🙂

I went on to college and after a disastrous freshman year that had to be repeated by a little less disastrous SECOND freshman year, I coasted through to my Senior year… met a boy and got married.  I had one semester left after we got married before graduation.  I was a senior in college with a decent GPA, an ENGLISH major, and I had STILL never read an entire book that was assigned to me by a professor.  This is pure craziness, I know!  I had one semester left and decided to take it easy.  I took The American Story, or something like that.  It was about american literature.  I had plans to just coast on through with some highly effective research and a lot of BS on essay and anything else I had to write.  However, I found myself wanting to be home with my new husband instead of researching at the library, and I just kept staring at the assigned book.  He was studying (he was getting ready to go to seminary), and I didn’t have anything else to do, so I picked it up.  I couldn’t stop reading it, and 16 years later, it’s still on my bookshelf.  I read all the rest of the assigned books for that class, made a pretty easy A, and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English degree! 🙂

I spent a few more years not really reading much, and then my mother said something.  She has a learning disability.  This makes it hard for her to read things and write things, and because of this she just didn’t read books.  I’m not sure when this changed for her, but one day, about 9 or 10 years ago, she and I were walking in Walmart and as we were checking out we saw a book on an end cap.  The cover of the book looked kind of like your typical romance novel, but the man on the cover looked like someone to me.  I was obsessed with a TV show about vampires (Called Moonlight, and THIS was the main character).  The main character looked a lot like the guy on the cover of this book… AND the book was about a vampire.  So we each bought a copy of it.  I didn’t live near her anymore, so we talked about the book (after we both read it very quickly) and realized there were more books in this series, and we had read them out of order.  (This is a huge pet peeve with me, but this time it worked out fine!)

Thus began the time in my life when I “learned to read”.  I started reading everything I could get my hands on.  This vampire series led me to other vampire writers and even other fantasy writers and soon I was reading all manor of paranormal romance as the genre is called.  I was reading 2-3 books a week and couldn’t go anywhere without having my book.  Something wonderful happened then… a device called a “kindle” was released about this time and I saved up my money for months to order one that was then back-ordered because so many people wanted one.  And then the obsession really escalated.  I eventually realized that emersing myself in these types of things started to effect my outlook on life.  I started thinking of things around me in terms of how one character would see this or think about this.  I might have gotten a little lost in my own paranormal world.

So, I backed off a little and added in some nonfiction reading to help me maintain balance, and to grow in different ways.  I still read 2-3 books a week, and should probably keep track of it a little better than I do, and I also constantly read more than one book at a time, and go back and re-read books I’ve read more than one time.  I will try to read almost anything, and because of that, there have been plenty of times where I’ve started a book and not been able to finish it because it was just too much… something… whether it’s too much suspense, too much violence, too much sex, too much stupidity by some of these female characters, I just haven’t finished them.  But… I will give every book a chance (if it’s first person point of view, I’ll gripe about it a lot, but I’ll still give it a chance).

So… What I’m currently reading…

• Fiction(4-6 grade): The Princess, The Scoundrel, and the Farm Boy
  • This is on the kids’ book shelf (I try to read all of the books that they are going to read this year)
• Fiction(for me): Danger & Desire (an anthology of Romantic Suspense Novels)
  • This is a good way to find different authors…
• Nonfiction (for me): Growing Great Kids
  • This is about partnering with God to raise kids to follow their calling and use their gifts to change the world!
• Audio: Good Manners for Nice People who Sometimes say F%&k
  • I don’t say F%&k, and I don’t really like this book.  It’s supposed to be telling us how to be nice with all of this technology around us.  More like, manners for the 21st Century.  The woman just seems kind of rude, and definitely a busy-body.  She takes pictures of people who do things she doesn’t like and posts them online to “publicly embarrass them because she thinks that’s better than having a direct conversation with them because she thinks they’ll only listen when they’ve been embarrassed.  Anyway, I’m finishing it because I can’t quit a book in the middle, but I’m not happy with it.
  • My audible bookshelf probably looks like it belongs to 10 different people.  A ton of different genres represented.

That’s all for now… I just try to read a little bit of everything… and I have a huge list of “to-read” books.  I’m constantly adding to them as I listen to podcasts and read more books.  I’m always open to suggestions, so let me know your favorite book or author and I’ll add it to my list…

Also… if you’re curious about the book I FINALLY read for my college class… here it is… straight from my shelf!  And I’ll link the first “vampire” book I read also… be warned… it’s not for everyone!! 😉

Vampire Book!! on Goodreads

Welcome to my world… it’s pretty great around here!!

Amanda

Author: Amanda Feeser

The world is turning and time is passing... we might as well move along with it... this is my journey of always walking forward! View all posts by Amanda Feeser