I didn't learn to read from a rainbow, but it helped

When I was a kid my favorite past time was to read. I love love loved to read all the time all day long. That is, until I was introduced to the original Nintendo, then it wasn’t too long before it was goodbye reading and improving my brain and hello to angry child rage when you play those impossible moving platform stages in Mega Man.
No, the real sad truth is one I’ve only recently come to a conclusion of: that I didn’t mature my books as I got older. When you’re a kid you read kid books. Like those golden books that have a huge picture on them and a sentence or two of text per page. Then you move onto very tiny novels of about a hundred pages or less in them. From there you should be moving onto real books and other stories that don’t involve kid dectives, aliens, or some wacky school that has 13 stories build on top of each other with one room. For the life of me I can’t remember what that book is called, but I want to find it and re-add it to my book collection. Again, guy who didn’t mature his reading here.
My problem is that I simply couldn’t find another series of books that I enjoyed as I got older. When I was a kid, and still can mind you, I had an impressive reading ability and would just demolish those short kids books in hours. I was a big fan of the Goosebumps books as well as the Animorph series when I was in grade and middle school, but the problem was they weren’t long enough. Around that age is when your parents are starting to teach you some responsibility and have you start paying for things on your own. Well to a kid $5 is a lot of money. Waiting a month for the next book to come out to throw your $5 into is a long long time. Especially when you have roughly a quarter of the book read before you even get home from the store. That just sucks. Even then it just didn’t seem worth it to do so. I loved the stories don’t get me wrong, but it was starting to look like a waste of money even for me, and that says a lot. So sadly I wasn’t interested in any of the more mature books that I got my hands on and I didn’t feel like reading these mini-novels were worth my time so reading just took a back burner for the longest time. Sure I’d find a good book every now and again but it just didn’t turn out that much.
About a year or two ago thankfully that started to change and I’ve begun to re-grow a collection of books. Although a little small at the moment, it;s growing and I’m pretty happy about that. Sadly for anyone other than me, my choice of collection of books probably isn’t the greatest or the most appealing. But I don’t really care. I like what I read and I’m ok with that.
So whats in that tiny collection? Well lets see here, two books by Tucker Max, they are semi-autobiographical but mostly about his stories of drinking, debauchery, and random hook ups all well written and although pretty ranchy, very funny. There are three zombie books in there because apparently I’ve become infatuated with zombies over the last few years. If there is one world ending scenario based off of movies and tv that I do not want to happen, its zombie apocalypse. Honestly I could write all day about how much that would suck and I probably will, but let’s just say there is no reason in the world that I would ever condone myself committing suicide EXCEPT for the zombie apocalypse. I’m pretty sure that’s pretty justifiable. There are a small collect of Spanish short stories and poem books and novels that I’ve accumulated in my Spanish literature classes over the years. I’ll be honest, the only reason they’re in there is that once upon a time I enjoyed a story or two that I had to read in class and the bookstore was only going to give me a dollar or two at most for them when I paid ten. Yeah, they’re there for class. But I could still go back and read them one day right? Yeah, probably not.
Then you get to the more realistic books that I’m not so ashamed of. I started reading the Life of Pi, but never finished it. It’s a struggle when the first hundred or so pages of this Robinson Caruso style book with tigers is just mindless filler and backstory that I doubt will be very relevant when the kid is stranded away from his family on an island with a tiger. Honestly, knowing about the guy who taught him how to live life accordingly and how to swim isn’t going to matter much after that. I do have high hopes for one day finishing it tho.
The Time Travelers Wife. Yes it is a chick novel in the most elaborate of ways. It is a tear jerker and it is a very very very sad book, but I like it. I first heard about it from my sister a few years back and when I finally got around to reading it I was enthralled with it. Some parts were hard to wrap my brain around but others were just so fascinating that I couldn’t stop reading it Sadly enough after I finished it and was emotionally drained from a fantastic experience of such a good book, I was left wanting to stab myself in the eye with a toothpick after watching the movie adaptation. Awful crap. If you’ve ever seen the movie but not read the book: pretend you didn’t and read the book. If you’ve read the book and not seen the movie: just don’t. And if you’ve done both like me, well you know which one is good and which one smells like my Armenian friend from a previous flight.
Another good one that you won’t find on any national best sellers list I would imagine, is In The Eye of the Storm by John Groeburg. Yeah it’s a religious kinda book, but its part adventure tale too. It’s the real experiences of the author when in his 20s he ventured to the Tongan islands to serve three years as a missionary. I read this book while serving as a missionary myself in Mexico a number of years back so I had that much in common, but to anyone else its also a pretty good read. It’s a very interesting look at a number of things that aren’t even related to religion. For example, he’s very good at describing Tongan culture and how different things are done down there and how much he had to adapt and adjust to people there just to be accepted. It’s neat to see how differently things are done for missionaries now as opposed to then, especially in countries that weren’t quite as developed at the time. For me, I was watched over, kept in contact with people, and met frequently with leaders and people all the time. While yes a scary new experience in a country that I didn’t speak the language very well at, at least people knew where I was. For John, it was pretty much, take a boat out there and see you in three years. Sure he had communication with people from time to time, but it might as well be months at a time.
On top of all that yes he puts his two cents in quite often about life lessons as well as things he learns from reading scriptures and things that reminded him of why he was there, but it never gets to overly preachy nor conversion based. You could easily read it as a well rounded nice guy, who is learning about himself and the people around and learning to love them. Or if you want to be lazy you could watch the movie version The Other Side of Heaven, but it’s really watered down Hollywood movie stereotypical poop. Well, as compared to the book. Stand alone as a movie it was pretty good.
There are more books in this so called mini collection of mine, but I don’t remember them all right now, nor do I feel like writing about them. That’s the way I am sometimes, passionate about something until I have to write about it, then it becomes a chore and I say nuts to that, which brings me to one quick side note while I’m thinking about it. The only time I really get a lot of reading in these days is while I’m flying, but the crappiest thing about that is that you always finish your book not at the end of your flight, but usually near the beginning. I’m on my second flight of the day with another hour to go and quite a few subsequent flights over the next week and I finished my book while on the runway. I hate you order of liftoff operations.