The Book Stack

Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi

Back in the day,  I was the one who read.  All. The. Time.

Those Summer Reading Clubs at the Library?  Encouraging kids to read six books over the summer?

Pfft.  I read six books the first week.

I got excited about a book that was really good.

To this day, I can still remember the sorrow I felt when I finished reading Heidi in second grade...not because it was a sad story but because it was over.  I remember the awe with which I finished A Wrinkle in Time in the 7th grade, the amazement at the end of Ben Hur in the tenth grade.  I remember the gratitude I felt...not to mention complete shock...when my sister handed me a copy of The Return of the King after happening to make a trip into town the afternoon after I finished The Two Towers ...she'd heard my lament at the cliffhanger ending.  Then there was the marathon reading session I did whilst down with a respiratory virus at college to finish a borrowed set of The Chronicles of Narnia and wondered where C.S. Lewis had been all my life....and prompted me to purchase the whole set of his Space Trilogy when I happened upon it in a bookstore shortly afterward.

Oh, yes, so many good books.

I remember my grandmother lamenting in her later years that she didn't have the patience to read anymore, and it made her sad.

I'll never be like that, I thought.  Reading is too rewarding.

But.  Y'all.  There are only 24 hours in a day.

And, just for grins, I took a picture of the Books Waiting to Be Read.

Sixteen books in that stack.  And there are a couple of others that I know of that were elsewhere and aren't in the stack. 

Some of them have been there for more than a year.  More than two years....And there are a couple of others that I've had for a long time and just haven't been able to get myself to get interested in them...recommendations from a friend or some such thing...and I've about decided it's to donate them to the library.

I actually have read a bit in a few of those books; the top book is the current study in our ladies' group at church and I'm probably two thirds through. But I never thought I'd have a stack of unread books.

I haven't kept track of the books I have read this year; maybe I should.  Kinda like I keep track of the yardage in/yardage out on the sewing blog.

Part of my problem is I like re-reading old favorites.  I've probably read The Lord of the Rings at least 15 times since that first agonizing trip through Middle Earth in 1977.   Brother Cadfael and I are well acquainted...and you know I've revisited Narnia over and over.  So sometimes, the reading time is spent in familiar territory.

But there is a wealth of wisdom, challenge and instruction in that stack.

I need to be more intentional about my reading.

Among other things...