Reading...

I'm part of this Book Group and everyone always suggests such serious books (seriously like political autobiographies) and then when we chat about them we have to be all serious and positive and make them apply to our lives in some meaningfully uplifting way. While I think that most everything you consume-food or book- ends up affecting you in some way in the end... well all I can think sometimes is...Why so serious?

Can't we just read for fun? For a good laugh and little silliness? For entertainment?  Can't we just pick apart the heroine and her poor, poor choice of men? Or say- what was the author thinking with that ending? Who cares if he is C.S. Lewis...it was dreadful!


I'm looking at my friends reading lists on Goodreads and I am thinking WOW! These are dead serious books. Are you people honestly reading these or are they just staring at you from your night stand. Because I have a whole stack of THOSE kind of books...but don't count them as being read. 

I am not saying that I don't read serious books-cause I do. Between Oliver Twist and 1776, I just like to break it up a bit by throwing in a little Percy Jackson or some gushy teen romance by Sarah Dessen.

Am I alone?

Maybe I survive on this reading diet, because I teach and learn all day with my kiddos and we are very serious most of the time (learning is a serious businesses you know). Sometimes I just want to take a break from Science and History and Laundry and the News and escape to something not even resembling reality in any form and not really think too hard and just laugh and be entertained by some clever author who fills my head with a relaxing mush like Jane Austen (her books are mush heaven). Then I am ready to take on something more serious like War and Peace and the fact that this post was mostly run on sentences and fragments of thought.

Bless the hearts of the serious readers...may you sleep well tonight...because unlike me you do not stay up way, way too late finishing silly books to see if they have happy endings.