Falling in Love, Again.

I fall in and out of love with reading. It's a torrent love affair: the passion, the mundane, the upset, the scars, the tears. What made me fall in love? I'm not sure if it was when my grandmother made the trip to Aberdeen and spent over a month reading with me, or the nights under my covers with a flashlight and Narnia tales, cliche, but real love.

Falling out of love has to do with required reading, the reading I require. I've been teaching for seven years, and for five of the seven years, I read the same books over and over and over and over again. I could have skimmed the novels, but I wanted to be able to respond to a student when he/she referred to pg. 15, line 18. Needless to say, I've been rereading The Catcher in the Rye and various other titles to their death.

Because my gig is teaching, and I'm passionate about the process and progress of teaching, this in love/out of love cycle will continue. BUT, today, I am back in love. I just finished The Brief and Wondrous life of Oscar Wao. I have some major complaints having to do with character development and sappy conclusion, but I read the book so quickly and was swept up by the footnotes, the fuku (curse) haunting the family, and the history of the Domenican Republic that here I am, in love with reading, again. There's no better feeling.