Reading Readiness!

Since there are still several hundred days  between me and my camino, the time must be filled somehow.  Aside from a passion for travel, I love, LOVE  books. So read away I will.

As a child I was known for taking the bedside lamp under the quilt and curling up...all toasty warm (can you say fire hazard!) to read Little Women, long after I was supposed to be asleep.  I was (and still am) the only person I've ever known who got into serious trouble, as in grounded, for reading classical literature.  I was slogging thru Hugo's Les Mis when I was about 12 years old, rather than doing any of my homework.  So, instead of returning it to the library per my mothers strict instructions, I wrapped it up in plastic bags, and stuffed in the roots of a large tree.  The tree was in the midst of a field I walked thru on my way into school each morning and again in the afternoon.  On my way in, I'd pick up my book, read it at lunch and any spare moment I got.  I'd even stop in the woods briefly, before redepositing the book, and read a few more lines.  This went on for weeks.  I guess my grades improved a bit, the reading addiction, it only got worse.

The following summer, my Mom took us kids up to Vermont as usual for the month of August.  To this day my sense of that summer is of it having been so a dreary and dark, filled with anxiety and tension.  Only much later did it dawn on me, that the Green Mountains of Vermont were lovely.  Only my time spent in Tzarist Russia following Anna Karenina was stressed and dark!  Sheesh!

Lets just say I'm happy to report, having spent my time in literary Gulags (yup read that too in my early teens) I've moved on to much sunnier climes.  At home today, as a result of a truly horrendous headache, I'm also the happy recipient of my latest book order from Amazon!  Today's FedEx delivery brought not one but two new books.  The latest offerings of my Internet snooping are:  Call of the Camino: Myths, Legends and Pilgrim Stories on the Way to Santiago de Compostela by Robert Mullen and Road to Emmaus: Pilgrimage as a Way of Life by Jim Forest.  The former was stumbled too via the Camino Forum, the later an offering from Amazon's little computer algorithms: if you like this, others who bought it bought these as well!  Computer dating at its finest.  Amazon, you can fix me up with a book anytime!

Book report at 11!