Fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.
– Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

What are you reading? How many books do you have in your stack? Do you read one book at a time, or multiple books over the course of time juggling between them? Do you keep a book or two or more in the car? Another in your bag or backpack? How about next to your bed? Or one in the living room? One stashed in your desk at work? Or just carry that one book wherever you go and won’t start another book until you’ve finished it?

How about a book club? Are you in one? Are you relieved that someone is telling you what to read and then all getting together to discuss the book? Takes away the decision of choosing. Or are you in a book club where you attend the gathering and talk about the current book you have read.

When you read do you read silently? Or do you read out loud, even to yourself. Novels? Poetry? I find reading Virginia Woolf out loud is helpful and have found out through conversations, I’m not alone.

I know, lots of questions. I get asked these questions all the time and always happy to answer. We all have our own reading style from what we read, how we read, to where. I enjoy the conversations I have with customers. Talking about what we are all reading. Fiction to biographies. Historical to the sciences.

Mainly I get into a groove of reading all the books an author wrote. Or the desire to immerse myself to learn about someone or place. Like when I went through my hip replacement, I decided I had to learn more about Hemingway. So, I read bios, and his earlier works. That lead to Martha Gellhorn. Currently I’m in an online reading group with the Grant Cottage State Historic Site learning more about President and General, Ulysses S. Grant.

Well, the boxes are calling out to me. Especially the boxes of Sci-fi that came in this morning. Got most of the literature up on shelves from last week’s boxes.

Oh, and what am I currently reading? RULES OF CIVILITY by Amor Towles. (Have you read A GENTLEMAN IN MOSCOW? Loved it.) Also reading THE LOWEST TREES HAVE TOPS, by Martha Gellhorn. Finishing Fergus M. Bordewich’s KLAN WAR: ULYSSES S. GRANT AND THE BATTLE TO SAVE RECONSTRUCTION. Also reading PACHINKO by Min Jin Lee. Towles’ and Gellhorn’s travel with me in my bag and Bordewich’s is at home as well as PACHINKO.

What I wonder is why everybody doesn’t carry a book around for those inevitable dead spots in life. – Stephen King