For Christmas 2011 my son gave me the first book in The Game of Thrones series. I read it on the airplane home from Texas on Dec. 30, and over the next couple of days. It became the first book I read in 2012. I proceeded to get hooked on the characters and the stories and the direwolves. :-) I read the next four books in the series in quick succession, and now wait fervently for the 6th book, just like my son!

Trying to pull myself away from Winterfell, The Wall and King's Crossing, I looked for another great book to read. Hubby and I went and saw The Help one day, and went straight from the movie to the bookstore afterwards! I had to read the book! I was deeply moved by the book and fell in love with Aibileen and Minny. I grew up in Texas during that exact time period while my husband was growing up in small town Mississippi during that exact same time period. He had an Aibileen!! Her name was Pearlie Mae. The only difference was, my husband's parents were dirt poor, his dad being a student at Mississippi State at the time. They lived in Student Housing and his mother had untreated (at the time) bipolar disorder. They paid Pearlie Mae next to nothing. Pearlie Mae was the one consistent person during my husband's very young years while his dad went to school and then worked nights. He's convinced that he might not have survived the tumultuous highs and lows of his mother had it not been for Pearlie Mae. When he was about 5 and his sister 3, they could no longer afford Pearlie Mae and had to let her go. He stood at their screen door, banging on the screen, and wailed and wailed for Pearlie Mae to come back. So...needless to say, The Help resonated deeply with me.

Next I jumped into The Hunger Games series. I had told myself earlier that I would not read this series about children killing children, but the movie trailer peaked my curiosity. The series was about so much more than children killing children, and again, I was hooked. Being a general optimist and proponent of happy endings, I can't say that I'm happy with the way the series ended, but it is what it is. I'll never forget Kat or Peeta or Rue or Gale or Cinna or Haymitch or Finnick. I loved those characters!

I have a few current authors who I really love: Harlan Coben, Lisa Gardner, Linda Howard, Stephen White and John Sanford. They are similar and write who-done-it type mysteries...most of them using the same characters from book to book who I've grown to enjoy. Harlan Coben and Lisa Gardner are my favorites. I've read ALL their books and always wait eagerly for the next one to come out. I accidentally discovered each of them in the Portland, Oregon airport bookstore, looking for books to read on the long flight home after our biannual trip to the Oregon Coast. Oh, and Dean Koontz, I like most of his books. Just not the ones that get too supernatural. Anyway, after finishing The Hunger Games series, I read Buried Prey, by John Sanford. I needed something that was set in current time to propel myself out of Kat & Peeta's world and back to "reality".

It was after reading Buried Prey that I decided I needed to go on a literary bender. I couldn't shake a quote I read in A Dance With Dragons (book 5 of Game of Thrones series): Jojen says, "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only once." I just loved that quote. I decided I wanted to live some of those lives through reading books....books that I'd heard about through the years and never read; books that I should have read long ago; books considered to be "classics"; books by esteemed authors considered to be the best in their field. So, the literary bender began. :-)

I've been posting my thoughts about the books I read on my facebook page, but decided that sometimes those entries are too long and probably aren't that interesting to many of the friends who have to scroll by them on their home pages. So, I decided to put my thoughts in a blog instead. Whether anyone ever reads it or not, at least the lives I've lived on the pages of the books will be written down!

Happy reading! (Whatever you're reading) :-)