7.18.2011

Garbage

I love to read. I'm currently trying to read 52 books or more this year and have just finished book 21.
I'm sad to report that book 21 was Heaven.
It is a garbage book that I read when I was young. Too young.

I started reading young (a retired English teacher turned children's librarian ruined any chance I had at being illiterate) and advanced quickly.
So much so that by the time I was 10 I was reading well above my age level...mostly adult books.
I started reading Stephen King around 11 and I also found books by VC Andrews. I'm sorry to say that VC Andrews is a darker more incestuous writer and they were WAY beyond what I should have been reading.

But I just kept reading them.
They wouldn't have been so bad had I been older. But they were terrible for someone with an already messed up idea of relationships even at 11-12.

As an adult re-reading my favorite series from her, they're actually quite ridiculous. My mom gave one as a gift to my niece when she was 14, and I promptly followed her up to her room and took it away.

Books like this make it seem like love should be complicated and dramatic, exhausting.
I feel like love is hard (as Liz Lemon said, "Love is weird, and sometimes gross"), but I'm learning that the seedy underbelly of relationships that I assumed was love isn't really. But I'm not sure what to do with that information yet...

No comments: