Ruined By Reading

I finished Lynne Sharon Schwartz's Ruined By Reading while I was in Atlanta, which I found tremendously exciting because A) I was with Lesley while I finished it and it counts towards her challenge and B) it meant another book on the year and I was free to move on to other things!

This is a small little book, just 128 pages long, and the first couple of pages filled me with dread that I had made a terrible mistake and this was going to be a boring book. How pleased I was to be proven wrong in short order!

RBR is a thought-provoking walk down one woman's reading memory lane, and gave me much to think about. For instance, Schwartz talks about what time of day she likes to read. I am a night-time reader. Devotedly. I always have been and always will be. I suppose this stems from the fact that we were allowed to stay up 30 minutes past our bedtime if we spent that 30 minutes reading and so every night I would snuggle down with a book and read. As a young girl, I was often caught up in mysteries, and I vividly remember getting busted one night for reading by the night of the nightlight. I was reading John Bellairs's The House With a Clock In Its Walls and I got so scared I actually screamed, causing my dad to run in and see what was wrong. Busted! But as you can see, even the cover of the book is deliciously creepy!



Schwartz talks about beloved books she had growing up, books which were lost and the replacements just weren't up to par, the minefield that is gifting a book (please don't! The pressure on the recipient to read it immediately and then love the book as much as you do is overwhelming!), what she's learned from books (and consequently what I learned from her reading, including why the Alabama license plates have the stars falling on them), finishing or not finishing a book, being interrupted while reading, and more.

This is a fabulous little book, I gave it a 4 star rating on GoodReads, just because it's not one of my favorites I've ever read, but I greatly enjoyed it. This book counts for the Bibliophilic Books Challenge!

Incidentally, if you are on GoodReads.com and try to friend me, please let me know that you have found me through the blog. I do not add people I don't know, my GoodReads feed was getting cluttered with the reading selections of complete strangers and it was frustrating!