Day 10: You Can't Even Judge A Book By Its Cover If You Don't Read

I love to read. Oh! how I love to read. One year my husband gave me a book I'd been hoping to read as a gift for Christmas. Little did the poor man know that I would immediately begin to read it and we'd be having cold sandwiches for dinner that evening - I spent a good four or five hours pouring over the pages of my novel, barely aware of the material world. That, my friends, is what a good book should do. It should utterly overwhelm your mind to the point that you begin to exist in the pages of the tome in your hands.

Can I just say that the adventures of Little Critter and Clifford don't quite cut it? Nor do the contents of the average magazine. (I love my scrapbooking magazines, don't get me wrong. But they don't feed the soul.) While I am known for reading anything and everything, I have subsisted for far too long on the paltry print on the back of tissue boxes and the simple books on the kids' bookshelves. I need some words, people.

For Christmas this year, I received the third book in a trilogy about Robin Hood, Will Scarlet and Friar Tuck. Oh, it was magnificent! I finished it by New Year's Day, and I'm proud to say that I managed to feed my family some nice meals between turning pages. I used to have a goal of reading as many books each year as years I am old - I gave that up because I had to start counting the kids' books to meet my quota. However, having a rich list to work from each year is still an idea I like.

Ideas, words you have to look up, descriptions of ages long past or parallel universes imagined are, I would argue, necessary for the soul. I just picked up the first book in The Song of Albion trilogy (same author as the Robin Hood trilogy) to read again. It's been long enough that I can't quite remember what will happen next, but familiar enough that the first few pages weren't reading like an awkward first date. Reading is fun.
I am absolutely worth a good book. I'm even worth daring to read a terrible book. The experiences that lie within a book's pages are priceless. It doesn't cost anything (unless you are me, in which case the county library can count on the fines incurred to buy next year's new releases), yet bestows so very much.

Question: Have you read a book lately? Do you even know what kind of book brings you joy? Would you consider listening to a book on CD while you clean house or drive to work?