Reading Matters

to me.
A lot. I learnt to read when I was 3.5 years old - or so I've been told, my first reading memories date back to reading stories to my fellow kindergarteners :) I've always read a lot, no matter where or when. My latest obsession with cross stitching and knitting however presents a real challenge to my reading cravings, as it keeps my eyes and hands occupied. And as an accomplished multitasker I might consider myself :), I have found it totally unsatisfying to do reading and knitting, not to mention reading and cross-stitching simultaneously. That is, until I found audiobooks! For the last four years I've read with my ears hundreds (I mean it, hundreds!) of audiobooks. And as my mind dislikes staying idle, I also take language audiocourses (Spanish and Italian, I also tried Greek but - ugh, I'm too old for such a difficult language :) and audiolectures from The Teaching Company - so far I've covered two courses on the History of the World, I especially enjoyed the one on Ancient Greece and Rome and two of their courses on linguistics (presently I'm listening for the second time to The Story of Human Language by John McWhorter - he's such a brilliant lecturer).

Some of my latest readings -

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Actually this was my second reading of the book, as I read it in its paper version in Bulgarian some years before. An absolutely brilliant book, I believe I might want to read it again. Given that there are so many books worth reading, re-reading a book might be considered a waist of time, but I love it. Sometimes I get tired of experimenting and new things and want something pleasant for sure - then I grab a favourite book. (I've read Pride and Prejudice more times than might be considered healthy :). Besides, every time is a new experience. When I first read The Curious Incident, I felt so much for the boy and was almost furious with his mother, but this time ... well, I saw things more clearly from her perspective.


We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Another first-person narrative, constructed like a puzzle with tiny pieces of information, which gradually build the whole story. I loved the first two thirds of the book immensely, but it somehow lost momentum towards the end, probably because I figured out the secret halfway through the first 10 minutes and then expected something bigger to happen, but the end was somewhat flat. Still a good read.




The Hidden Reality by Brian Greene is quite a mouthful for me, so I take it in small bites - some 30-40 min a day max. It's lots of heavy physics and cosmology (Brian Greene is a theoretical physicist) on the origin of the Cosmos, the Big Bang theory, Einstein's Relativity, parallel universes and such.






And these arrived today in paperback:



The third volume of The Hunger Games has been eagerly expected by husband, daughter and me, we'll see who'll get it first :)