I do all my reading these days via audiobook, and usually while walking.
I can envision where I was walking when the new Mrs. DeWinter glided down the stairs for the fancy dress ball (Rebecca) or when Mattie Ross was bit by a rattlesnake (True Grit). Sophia introduced me to the poetry of Billy Collins, and I started with Aimless Love and Whale Day; they made me laugh out loud while planting and weeding the garden.
I inhaled the latest title in Joel C. Rosenberg’s Marcus Ryker series: The Libyan Diversion, and having conquered most of the Sherlock Holmes books, I have now finished eight Agatha Christie mysteries. It was refreshing to read the enchanted fairy-tale-twist Snow and Rose; I think I liked it as much as my youngest daughter did.
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
C.S. Lewis
I walked miles in circles around our property when I was reading Rebecca, because I couldn’t pull myself away. What beautiful descriptions of gardens and scenery and rooms and mansions, but also a journey into a mind of wrong assumptions and insecurities that seems all too familiar.
Watership Down…what can I say? One can only push a book on family and friends so much. How can a book about rabbits be so good that you’d read it two Augusts in a row? Well, it just is that good and I cannot explain why. Read the reviews and consider reading it for yourself; the audio version is distinctively wonderful.
I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
C.S. Lewis
But you cannot force someone to like a book. Mrs. Skibbe assigned True Grit to us in 7th grade American History class and I hardly glanced at it. I wish I could tell her now how much I enjoyed that book 40+ years later.
My cousin Tommy gave me the The Tripod Trilogy by John Christopher when I was a teenager and not particularly interested in science fiction — especially when the main character was a boy. However, these three books came to be some of my favorites. I forgot about them until recently, when I was searching for books for my youngest sons, aged 14 and 15. They gobbled up the series, and so did I again — absorbing different things as an adult reader. Books are magical that way.
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.
C.S. Lewis
I am in a delicious rut of fiction-reading. But, the Christian book Gentle and Lowly stopped me in my tracks — I loved it and cried through it, having my eyes opened in a fresh way to the mysterious, unexplainable, unearned, immeasurable love of God. It’s one to read over and over again.
We read to know we are not alone.
C.S. Lewis
My Word Soup 