I'm never going to read again!

I have always been a voracious reader. I love to read. When I was in elementary school, if I wasn't running through sprinklers, eating popsicles, riding bikes, or going to the beach, I was at the library. My dream road trip is taking a historical route and pulling over at every road sign in order to read the historical marker. When we go to museums or anything, my family always gets way ahead of me because I stop and read every sign. I read the liner notes in albums. I always spent my birthday money at Coles Books.

My parents joined a children's book club when we were kids, so every month we would get a couple of Disney or Dr. Seuss books. I read these books over and over. I read them to my parents, and I read them to my siblings. Those books are trashed from all the reading I did.

After Dr. Seuss came Nancy Drew. I babysat for a friend of my mum's early in my babysitting career and she had every book ever written about Nancy Drew. Every time I babysat, I would borrow a couple.

About grade six, I was introduced to young teen romance books like Sweet Valley High. These are the books I would spend my birthday money on. These were the books I checked out from the library. They were easy to read, not boring like the books assigned at school, and so addictive.

Once I got to high school, I quit reading books for pleasure. I had to do so much reading for school that I didn't want to look at one more book. Ridiculously enough, I still had a huge appetite for reading, but this was filled with liner notes from cassettes, newspapers, and magazines. I am full of useless information because of all the magazines I read. Berit used to ask me, "How do you know all these random facts?" The answer? I read. She calls me a media maven. I kinda love it. I'm not book smart, I'm not street smart, I'm media smart.

I was introduced to magazine reading the summer between grade eight and nine. We were staying at a cabin in Birch Bay, WA and it was raining and I was, like, so bored. My mum sent me to the little store to see if I could find something to read. I found a couple of teen magazines like the ones my cousin Cyndi read. I bought them, and I was hooked. My favourites were Teen, Seventeen (had a subscription to that one), Elle, Spin, and Smash hits. Reading magazines caused the detour in my reading career that I regret. I missed out on classics like The Chronicles of Narnia and the works of Roald Dahl because I never went to the library any more; I just bought magazines.

I have since been re-introduced to the wonder that is the library, and my love for reading for which I am joyous, but I've been trying to slow down on all the reading to make room for some writing.

Well, a month or so ago, DH was going to lose his Continental air miles unless he used them. He didn't have enough for a flight anywhere, but he could use them for magazine subscriptions. None of the magazines really appealed to him, but were there any that I would be interested in? I now have a stack of the following on my night table: In Style, Glamour, Elle, GQ, Details and Entertainment Weekly.

As soon as the subscriptions started rolling I thought to myself, "Great, I'm never going to read a book again!" Fortunately, Beautiful Creatures came available at the library and I am hooked on a new series of books. I have also discovered that I don't have to read every single article in the magazine, so it doesn't take me as long to get through magazines like it used to.

Now that I've found balance between reading books and magazines, I'm hoping that I can find some balance between reading and writing.