I
can barely remember a time when books weren’t a part of my life. Growing up on a fairly isolated 55 acre
spread in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Blacksburg, Virginia, books were often
the place I turned for companionship. I
fondly remember running up and down the mountain as a child pretending to be
the protagonists in books such as the Little House series, Hatchet,
or My Side of the Mountain. The
love of reading persisted throughout adolescence, and I eventually went on to
get my bachelor’s degree in English at Calvin College.
It
was a natural progression from reading to wanting to write a novel. As a teenager, I had the lofty ambition of
winning the Nobel Prize for literature.
Sometime around this point, I quit daydreaming and actually started
trying to write. I made a few rough
drafts, the longest totaling about 150 pages around my freshman year of
college. As I read and wrote essays on
books during college by actual Nobel prizewinners such as Gabriel Garcia
Marquez and Toni Morrison, I discovered that perhaps I’d overestimated the ease
of writing a Nobel prize-worthy body of work.
I
reassessed my goals, decided I’d like to write something good enough to end up
as a book that would slowly make its way to classic status, or at least become a
cult classic. A few years and
unsuccessful starts later, and I finally decided that I’d be perfectly happy if
I could just write the great American best-seller. After all, this isn’t exactly a category that
calls for world class writing skill (James Patterson and the insult to plot, characters,
pacing, and the English language that is the Left Behind series come to
mind). Unfortunately, it does call for a
rare combination of luck, a great agent, and a finished novel of some
form. Having none of these, I went back
to reading.
The
great recession and a few other personal events intervened, and I now work as a
registered nurse, which I enjoy.
However, I began to really miss the social and academic aspects of
reading, including discussing themes, talking about characters, and even writing
essays. Joining
an in-person book club hasn’t worked out due to a somewhat peripatetic schedule
where I’m at work when most people are at home and at home when most people are
at work. Fortunately, the internet has
opened a host of opportunities in this area.
To
try to work towards a goal of writing regularly, even if it’s not a novel, I
thought it would be fun to try discussing and writing about books. I read pretty much anything, so I plan on a
wide range of books from YA and children’s literature to classic literature to
more popular books and non-fiction. I’m
going to mostly gear this towards people who have already read the books I’m
discussing, so spoilers for those who haven’t read the book may happen at
times.
What
are your favorite books?
