Books I've read am reading want to read or have put down to start something else

I am a reader.  Through and through.  If I could only use 6 words to describe myself, I would probably say something like: reader, eater, dreamer, seer, lover, creator.

According to family lore, I was reading at age 4.  I'm not sure if that's impressive or not, but it is something that I used to brag about back in the days when that seemed like the type of thing that might bring me some school yard cred.  Please mind that I was an extremely insecure little tyke.

I can still remember one of the first books that I read.  It was a typical See Dick Run sortof thing, but I liked it.  I liked being able to put the words together and liked that I could do something "allbymyself."

I was a relatively active child, but reading was the one thing that could keep me in place.  In my old house, growing up, we had a room, we called the barn--mostly because it was a refurbushed barn my dad figured out how to attach to our house through a shed, which sounds weird, but was actually really cool.

I remember on the weekends, the family and there were a lot of us, would be spread out in the rather large house.  My grandparents were on the second floor.  My brothers were either out or up in the loft that was their ultra cool bedroom.  My father was probably tucked away in his little nook of an office, but there was usually a fire going on in the wood stove and there were shelves and shelves of books to choose from.

And I would challenge myself to see if I could read an entire book.  Which I was varyingly successful at.  I basked in my mother's rare words of praise because she noticed that I was being quiet and wasn't underfoot.  Not that I really ever was because we didn't get along and while I yearned to be close to her--secretly--in reality, it was always far more pleasant to be be away from her than in her proximity.

Later, I would read because I was grounded all the time.  Literally, I think in my 9th grade year, I was not grounded for maybe a total of 5 weekends.  The one place my parents let me out to go to was the library.

Looking back it seems ridiculous to think that if I could ride my bike the two miles to the library, it would make just as much sense that I would ride my bike to a friend's house, but tho my mother proclaimed me untrustworthy, she knew she had me by fear, so to the library I went and would spend hours choosing books to lug home in my backpack to read when I was wardened back into my bedroom.

Fifteen to twenty books a week would not be an unreasonable number of books to read.  I loved getting lost in those silly worlds that kept me sane through my teenage years.  I wasn't reading "important" literature like Jane Austin or Charlotte Bronte, though I did really like reading Charles Dickens even if I didn't understand it that well.  No, the books I read were the silly ones.  The girly ones.  The ones that had happy endings.

I still feel guilty for reading the books, I call "silly" because that's what I like to read, except, now I have swerved more towards fantasy than anything else in the past five years.  However, one of the best "lessons" one of my writing professors bestowed up on me was that it doesn't matter the type or style or genre I read and feeling ashamed or guilty about it was completely not important, because, and here was the lesson and the gift all wrapped up in one, it was all just reading.

Sigh.

So, as I'm sitting here, fantasizing about writing and rather than fantasizing, I think it'd be more accurate to say, I am brewing, concocting a story, a pretty big one right now, it is like this gigantic monster inside my head that is like, flailing against a barely controlled brainstorm.

I am -- I think going to write the story of a lifetime over this year.

But I digress:
The books I am reading, have read, or am in the middle of are:

Dash and Lily's Book of Dares by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan
Freak Show by James St. James
Angelology by Danielle Trussoni
The Help: Kathryn Stockett
Room by Sarah Donoghue (horrifying subject.  hated that it hung on in my mind for awhile)
City of Fallen Angels by Cassandra Clare
The Magician King by Lev Grossman.  (Am upset about the ending)
What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell (I LOVE this guy.  He's a bloody genius.)
I loved, I lost, I Made Spaghetti by Guilia Melucci. ( a little too whiny for my taste)

The are books I can remember off the top of my head that have been in my life since late August, Early September til now.

And that's all.