A new kind of reading

I miss the days when I had time to read. College has a knack of keeping me busy. It's a blessing, because more and more, I'm finding that I prefer to be so.

I'm not just busy with classes and assignment, but also with household, clubs, work, planning internships and getting just a little bit of breathing time in between.

But the busyness has changed the way I do a lot of things.

In the last few years, I've realized that reading has, frankly, become something that's no longer a part of my life.

There are a few reasons for the change. Firstly, of course, I'm busy. College doesn't (and shouldn't!) allow me time to lay back and doze. Except when I really need it. I've given up coffee, after all. Sigh.

Secondly, I'm finding ever-growing conflicts between what I want to read and where I am in my life. At nineteen, I sense that I'm a little too old for YA novels, but I still read them. They fill a hunger for wonder that I still have and still remember. They're universal in that way. At the same time, we need both old and new favorites.

More and more frequently, I find myself browsing the adult section of bookstores and coming away dissatisfied. I want something with substance, something that is wholesome and wonderful and well-written and enticing, but still part of the adult world. But often, I can't seem to find it.
Recently, however, reading has come into my life in a new way, and it's a way I never would have expected.

I am a lazy reader. I want to relax into a story, not work to understand it. Most brutal would be to ask me to read new stories - and yet, lately, newspapers are my reading material of choice.

Seems legitimate. I'm a journalism student! Through the semester, I've filed into the university Mac lab twice a week to learn to write news stories.

Reading the news is challenging. It doesn't allow my mind to sit back and go aaahhh at the end of a long day. Often, I struggle to understand. My eyes jump over passages when the lines blur. I have to be patient and go back, making sure I'm fully processing everything on the page.

The point is to draw my own conclusions, so I can't rest while I read.

It's a discipline to read real-life issues, and yet it's fulfilling.

To look at it from one angle, journalistic and creative writing seem two completely opposite ends of the spectrum. Journalism is pure information, stripped of poetic devices, of all the delicious language, and yet it's an art form. Moreover, it's an important one.

I'm reading about things I never would have wondered about or cared to know. Controversial vaccines. Chinese filial piety laws. I'm even dipping my shy toes into the political spectrum.

It's a discipline that's pulling me from my reader complacency. Right now, I'm growing as hungry for news as I once was - and, I hope, still am - for fiction.

What I'm Reading Right Now

I've spent far too much time on figment lately, but I've also had the wonderful, amazing, lovely, delicious time to read at ALL. Books! I bid Borders a sad goodbye in 2011, but there's a Barnes and Noble within fifteen minutes of my house, and the employees must be getting tired of seeing me. I'm the kind of girl who sits in the back all day with a stack of books and doesn't move till closing time. It just [insert creepy side note] smells so good in there.

1. Happy Cafe -Figment novel by Enaam Alnagger
Figment has introduced me to the wonderful world of magical realism. It's rare that an entire genre hooks me in, but I'm dying to try it for myself. In the meantime, I have scads of beautiful stories both of the paper and of the electronic form. Happy Cafe is the story of Elodie, a lonely girl who discovers a magical cafe, carried to her town with the beginning of the winter. I got hooked by the story right away. It's a really beautiful piece of work and full of characters I'm dying to learn more about. I love, love, love the name Elodie, by the way.

2. Midnight in Austenland, by Shannon Hale
This is the third time I've read the book since it came out in January. It's the sequel to Austenland, which is coming out as a movie this year, directed by Jerusha Hess! And since both books are just a big chunk of wonderful, I'm going to go ahead and tell you what they're about. Austenland is the story of Jane Hayes, a single, thirty-three-year-old New Yorker. Is there a reason she's single? Oh yes. Jane is obsessed by the idea of Mr. Darcy, particularly Mr. Darcy as played by Colin Firth in the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice. When her great-aunt discovers her secret, Jane finds herself the recipient of a prepaid, three-week vacation to a secret resort called Pembrook Park. In Pembrook Park, it's still 1816, and life is easy--full of empire dresses and Regency manners, strolling in the park and maybe, just maybe, a proposal from a certain gentlemen. Once firmly in Austenland, however, it is up to Jane to discover what is real and what is only fantasy....

Midnight in Austenland could stand on its own, but the two books together form such a scrumptious series. It takes up a new main character, Charlotte Constance Kinder. Charlotte, a successful businesswoman, loving wife, and mother of two, will never understand what drove her husband away. Cast off in favor of a mistress, Charlotte takes comfort in Austen books and soon, discovers Pembrook Park. However, this time, things take a dark turn, and Charlotte begins to suspect that a murder has taken place inside Pembrook's walls. Add that to the mystery of the brooding Mr. Mallery and Miss Gardenside's unusual illness, and Charlotte becomes a detective extraordinaire, determined to solve Pembrook's secrets...

Shannon Hale is so unbelievably original and witty. Her books have me literally laughing out loud. While Austenland obviously draws inspiration from Pride and Prejudice, Midnight in Austenland takes a Northanger Abbey turn, with murder, mystery-solving, and a fair amount of gothic romance. Both of the books are fantastic.

3. James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl
Yep, you heard me. I went through a hefty Dahl phase as a child. My favorites were Matilda and James and the Giant Peach. I suppose Dahl wrote magical realism as well, though I've never categorized him into a genre before. I have to confess I'm still drawn to the children's section in bookstores. Everything is colorful, the books are creative and funny. I still pull books off the "5th-8th grade" shelf. Recently, I wandered over and found James again. Then I sat down in the cafe and read it from cover to cover. One of my favorite things about Roald Dahl aside from his fantastic imagination is his wordplay. The Big Friendly Giant still gets me laughing ("You are once again gobblefunking! Don't do it. This is a serious and snitching subject.") and it was just the same with the naughty singing Centipede on the peach trip across the Atlantic. I think I even had a Dahl cookbook when I was little that taught you how to make "hot noodles made from poodles on a slice of garden hose....."

4. Birdcage Girl -Figment novel by Kimberly Karalius

I've read pretty much everything else Kimberly has posted on figment, including her awesome novel-in-progress Boys and Bees, so it surprised me I hadn't dived into Birdcage Girl yet. Once I did, I hung over my computer for five days, reading the deliciously short chapters. Another foray into magical realism that left me with nothing but awesomeness. Birdcage Girl centers around Ashlyn, a girl kept locked in a birdcage by her overprotective mother. One of my favorites aspects of the novel (well, okay, I had a LOT of favorite aspects) was the characterization. A girl locked in a birdcage, a doctor who knows secrets of her past, a butler with metal bones, and a female cat named Jimmy.
Any time there's a cat, I'm hooked. ;)

5. The Jane Austen Handbook: Proper Life Skills from Regency England, by Margaret C. Sullivan
A birthday present from my mother, and I'm loving it. It's perfect that it came while we're in the middle of reading Midnight in Austenland (I read aloud to my mother--yes, with a bad British accent). It's amazing that Jane Austen still garners so much fascination from readers, two hundred years after the publication of her books. The book recalls some good moments from Austen's books (disastrous proposals, gossip, and a nice chunk of Miss Jane's humor), and gives information on everything from hairdressing, to what to do during a summer visit to Bath, to how to politely reject a proposal of marriage ("If all else fails, swoon.")

It's never fun during the schoolyear when I rack my brains and realize I can't remember the last time I read a book. Vacation time is good time in my book (hahahah, okay, sorry, there's a stray pun), where I can sleep in and spend the day reading (also writing, tracking down that lost camera charger, cleaning the kitchen, applying for a job, recycling the scads of scrap paper in my room, ripping the stray threads out of my new sweater.....). You get the idea. As I'm geting older and just a tad busier, I'm realizing more and more what a gift a good book is. The bookstore will never get rid of me.

The books I'm far too old for

Last year when I was in Germany, my exchange partner's father, Ludwig, was extremely generous with his books. When I arrived and told him, yes, I liked to read, he immediately led me to their third floor and piled my eager hands high with both his favorites and ones he had read to his boys when they were children.

Of course, they were all in German. Although I'm normally a very quick reader, it took me two months alone just to get through the first one he gave me. I went to my bookshelf after that and decided I wanted a bit of an easy read next. My choice was Der Wilde Wald, "The Wild Forest", by Tonke Dragt. Originally published in Norwegian, fantastical, funny, adventurous, even a couple moments that made my heart thump.

One morning in the dining room I pulled Der Wald out. After a while, Ludwig appeared, and as he got his breakfast ready, he glanced sideways at the title and said:

"That book is a little young for you, isn't it?"

He didn't mean it condescendingly--he wanted to be hospitable and make sure I was enjoying myself. But since I was enjoying it so much, my instincts startled up in defense.

It's the same back home. Every now and then I sneak a book off my shelf that I should have outgrown years ago, but I haven't, because it's just too darn good.

Here's my official list:

1. Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine
I remember living in rural Texas in the third grade and experiencing my first agonizing, breathtaking moment of cartharsis, bending over my copy, my nine-year-old heart pounding during that final scene. Char was also the first character who ever got me blushing. And I would still willingly slide down a stair rail with him.

2. The Frog Princess Series, by E.D. Baker
There's something fuzzy about these books. There's constant humor popping up, the kind that makes me chuckle out loud, and even though I would probably barely rate them at PG, a certain character always gets my heart jumping when he asks for a kiss. Reading these and Ella in one sitting would probably send me into cardiac arrest.

3. Understood Betsy, by Dorothy Canfield Fisher
This was one of the many times my mother was right when she said, "You'll like it if you try it." It's homey and sweet, and set in New England, which is where I spent some of my childhood. I love watching the transition of Elizabeth Ann into Betsy, and reading of Cousin Ann hugging her goodbye.

4. The BFG, by Roald Dahl
I went through a hefty Dahl phase as a child, and still don't know any other official definition for an epicure except, "It is someone who is dainty with his eating." This spring, I went through our storage closet and found my much-loved copy of BFG. I laughed out loud the whole way through. Dahl had a gift for messing with words, which I love, while admittedly developing some frightening situations (50-foot giants running around the world every evening to eat "human beans", an extremely small, 24-foot giant who can create dreams, nightmares rattling in jars, that sort of thing).

5. The Princess Academy, by Shannon Hale
I am constantly in awe of Shannon Hale and love her teen and adult books, but Princess Academy tends toward a younger audience with as much creativity and loveliness. I was twelve when I first read it, and sat in my window seat until my backside was numb, forgetting to do important things, like eat, until I read the last quarry song and saw the last miri petal twirl off above a mountain.

6. Johnny Tremain, by Esther Forbes
My mother read this to me years ago, and we stayed up much later than I was supposed to, probably as late as ten-thirty. It was one of the first times I remember hating a character in a story. Not because it was a bad character. Because you were supposed to. That induced more heart-thumping, of a different variety.

7. The Bronze Bow, by Elizabeth Gouge
I believe my fourth grade class read this together. I loved Daniel, the main character, in spite of his surly behavior. How is it that that just made him all the more loveable? The ending is beautiful, with one line standing out particularly in my memory:

"How light it is," Leah murmured. "Even with Jesus gone."

With all these stories, there's something irresistably lovely that makes it impossible for me to let them go. Maybe I'm one of those people who don't outgrow children's stories. I'd like to be one of those people.