What Makes Me a Different Reader
... or how a new friend group showed me yet another way I'm different.
Almost two years ago, my husband and I moved from southern California to southwest Washington. There were a lot of exciting things about this particular move, but there were aspects of my personality I knew I was going to have to pay close attention to. I am an introvert with a tendency to completely withdraw when stressed. I can regularly go months at a time without speaking to any friends, only to emerge and have lunch or meet for coffee with a couple different people before retreating back to my home and into my head and the safety of my everyday routine.
There are issues with that, of course. I also have a history of depression and anxiety, which can be exacerbated if I spend too much time in my own head. Finding the right level of social time and alone time is an ongoing struggle I fight to maintain.
Moving 1,000 miles away from everyone I know to a place where I only know people from work meant I needed to find some friends, and find a creative way to do that.
To do this, I offered to start a book and writing club for a larger Facebook group of Californians who had moved to our part of Washington. This did a couple things—it got me out of the house to meet people; it meant there was always a book to read; and it meant I got my own venue to talk about books in the way I like to discuss them.
I’ve been doing that for about a year now. As book clubs go, we’re still in the early stages, but there’s been a development that I didn’t anticipate: apparently, I run book clubs differently than others do.
Many people in my book club are in more than one—some are part of two or three clubs and have the time to read for all of them. What the book club regulars have told me is that the way I foster discussion is different than others. I’m clear that you don’t have to finish or even read the book to be part of the discussion. We talk about how the books make us feel; what themes spoke to us; and how they relate to things in our lives.
I don’t need to quiz everyone on a book’s plot—we’re adults not students. Books are meant to be explored and dissected to find the part that speaks to the soul.
That’s what I hope to convey with The Reading Alcove: the reasons why specific books spoke to my soul—or didn’t—and how they can perhaps speak to yours. These are book reports and summaries of a different kind; they’re descriptions about how the books haunt me or how their themes speak to me decades after I read them.
I hope you join me for awhile, but if you don’t stay long, I hope that I can show you different ways of viewing reading for pleasure, for self-exploration, for self-awareness, for a different way of looking at the world
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