Read More. Write More.

January.

Cold.

Dark.

Depressing.

Blah.

The holidays are over and now there is January. In the past several years, January and I have become fast friends. What other month gives us a more slower pace of life, gives us time to reflect and gather strength for the coming months. January has become my month for reading, decluttering, regrouping, reevaluating. breathing more deeply. I even have come to prefer running in January versus July. With January also comes goal setting which I gave up years ago. I do think about where I've been and where I'd like to go but that happens all year long, not just in January.

However, this year I'd like to:

Read and write more in 2024. Has kind of a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

Reading is hard.

Writing is hard.

Social media is easy.

This is my Goodreads list for books read in 2023.

Not bad. 18 books (although 2 I didn't even finish). 5200 pages. Until I tell you that in 4th grade I read 10,000 pages in one term to earn lunch with my teacher. I was the only student who completed that challenge. I think pages are more important than books when it comes to stats.

So I'm challenging myself to break that 10,000 page barrier this year. It's going to be tough. I have a lot of things vying for my attention and time. Reading takes a lot of mental alertness and focus which isn't easy to come by in the evenings when social media is so much easier to digest.

I challenge my students to read every night for 20 minutes. If they do, they earn a penny (2nd graders still LOVE pennies). If I read AND they read, they get 3 pennies. They love to keep me accountable.

Writing has taken a back seat to . . . I'm not even sure. But I do know that there is a connection between writing and remembering. I need to write more, especially about my scripture reading. I read them. I mark them. I write in them digitally and physically, but I'd really like to write to connect my life to what I am studying. Maybe it will be on this blog. Maybe it will be in my journal. We'll see.

YES to reading and writing more in 2024!

_________________

These are the days of:

Discovering how smart I was as a mom when I finally got to the last child. With all my decluttering, I found Alex's school poster and as I was dismantling it, I found that I had originally created it when he was in kindergarten and knowing he would have another to do in 1st grade, I kept it and simply swapped out the "All About Me" paper and kept the photos in the same place. I did this again in 2nd grade. I guess by 3rd, they no longer did birthday posters. Pretty genius of me and saved a lot of time. Just wish I had figured that out with my first 4.

My reading life

"I was born a reader, it seems, surrounded by books, with free choice and plenty of time to read under my covers with a flashlight." (Passionate Readers)

That one statement pretty much sums up my reading life. A question surfaced the other day from a colleague: Did I remember learning how to read?

That made me really dig deep into the filing cabinet of my memories.

No. I don't recall how I learned to read. But I do remember my library card number . . . 176. I didn't have tons of books at my house growing up, but I did have access to the library and I had a reading mom. One of my favorite places to read was in the closet of my brothers' room surrounded by books like Go, Dog, Go (one of my favorites). My dad had built a shelf in there that recessed into the closet. What kid doesn't like holing up in a small, tight space to read. Under the covers and beneath the Christmas tree were some other favorite spots.

"People read for a multiplicity of reasons. . . . I'm grateful for my one life, but I'd prefer to live a thousand--and my favorite books allow me to experience more on the page than I ever could in my actual life." (I'd Rather Be Reading)

The books that really instilled a love of reading were the Little House on the Prairie books. Back in the day of the Sears Christmas catalog, I would browse through that toy book, dreaming and hoping that I would some day get the entire series for myself. 

I still have that set 34 years later.

My summers were spent walking the two blocks to the library and sprinting back home to hermit in my room reading. I recall one summer I was really intrigued with space and wanted to be an astronaut. Maybe it was the summer of Christa Mcauliff, the first teacher to go to space. My timeline is vague, but I wanted to know all I could. I remember thinking that if I really studied one thing in depth each summer, I would have learned a lot after several years. Well, I began with space. I read a lot of what our little library had on the subject of space. And unfortunately, my quest for extensive knowledge began and ended that summer.

My mom was a reader of novels. My dad read the magazines Time and Reader's Digest (my first foray into the internet was a search for Reader's Digest in 1996 while sitting in a computer lab at Utah State University with Tyler sitting beside me). I remember pulling A Wrinkle in Time off the shelf at the school library and stumbling through it. A junior high class requirement was to read a biography, so I went to the library and found a book on Chuck Yeager, the pilot who broke the speed of sound. I hated that book because I found it so boring. I picked up James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans off a shelf in our basement and didn't get very far due to the difficulty of the writing. Did those experiences make me less inclined to read? No. In fact today biographies or memoirs are one of my favorite genres to read. And perhaps Mohicans might be easier to read 25 years later.

My life as a reader has evolved over the years. Babar, Harriet the Spy, Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, The Boxcar Children, and Beverley Cleary's endearing Ramona Quimby were a few I indulged in as a child. My desk in Mrs. Jones's third grade class even held the Bible that I would pull out and read. In my tween years it was the drama of Sweet Valley High and the mystery solving of Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden. I later moved onto authors Dorothy Keddington, Lois Duncan, and even admit to ashamedly reading a V.C. Andrews book or two. I loved Jack Weyland and Gerald Lund.

To Kill a Mockingbird was the first book I bought for myself. I can still vividly recall being in a Deseret Book store at a mall, looking through that book, and deciding to buy it.

During my college years, there's quite a gap in my reading experience. I claim to never have read a book for fun in college, but I'm sure I read something at least during the summer months.

In my 20s as a young mom, I read a lot of "self-help" books, namely parenting books and a few biographies. However, one of the most engaging novels that surfaces again and again in my literary conversations was a book suggested to me by a dear friend, Nancy Peixhot, in my Salt Lake ward: Phantom, the story of the Phantom of the Opera told from the viewpoint of the phantom. Such a captivating read. In fact Erik is spelled with a K instead of a C because of the main character of that book. In my 30s I started attending a book club which renewed my interest in other genres. That was a major turning point in my reading life. I have been exposed to books I wouldn't have otherwise picked up. I have loved talking about the books we read and making connections.

And now in my 40s I'm on a quest to teach my young students to be better readers and to instill a love of reading in them. Those are really my two goals as an educator. And I believe with 6 days left of school I just may have accomplished at least goal #2 when they beg me to let them read their books.

Tell me how I'm supposed to say no to that? So we sit and read and talk books and I love it.

So where am I now as a reader?

Well, I need reading glasses :) and I need deadlines. Books I borrow from the library get read more often than books I've bought and stored on my bookshelves at home. 

I continually add to my bookshelves, real and virtual. I most likely have way more books on my actual and virtual bookshelves than I'll ever read and that is quite all right. It reminds me of all that I do not know and have yet to discover and the stories I have yet to experience.

I am discovering a love for picture books. My students love it when I read to them. So I've been on a quest this year to discover picture books that tie in to the lesson I'm giving that day.

I document the books I read and have begun leaving a brief synopsis in Goodreads. I've found that I can remember reading books but I can only remember if I liked it or didn't. I want to recall more than that about the books I read. Plus Goodreads is a great site to get recommendations or to do a little sleuthing about a book I might be interested in reading before I actually commit to it.

I am still a bibliophile who seeks out bookstores on vacation much to the chagrin of a son-in-law. On our last family outing we discovered a bookstore in Boulder, Colorado that was a close second to Powell's in Portland.

I was born a reader and will always be a reader. It is definitely one of my most favorite things to do in my "spare" time.

Reading challenge

Last year I gave Tyler a vinyl wall hanging for Christmas and it sat in his office as we meandered through the dark, wondering where life was taking us.

This year I regifted it again for Christmas and had our expert graphics guy, aka Erik, position it and hang it up. Oh, how I loved the finished look it has given our library area. I gave Ash an assignment one day to count how many books we had. She gave up after 1000. I believe I own books I may never read and that is okay. Last year I simply wanted to read more and write more and I came off conqueror.

I finished 40 books in the course of a year. For some that may be a little and for some that may be a lot. For me, I was surprised when I pulled up the number. Especially given this past year and the busyness of it. I read several books devoted toward school stuff. And I began reading more young adult books which don't require as much digestion as adult books tend to. Nor are they as lengthy.

My stats say I read over 10,000 pages. That makes me feel like a wimp as I recall my 4th grade year. I had a teacher, Miss Maxwell, who issued a reading challenge. For anyone who read more than 10,000 pages in a term, she would take them out to lunch.

*Surprise birthday party Miss Maxwell came to.

Well, you didn't have to ask me twice. I was all over it and ended up being the only one who actually accomplished that goal.

So far this year I'm finishing up an audio book (Lone Survivor), trying to complete a book club read that may not happen (The Killer Angels), and have started a novella by an author that intimidates me (The Shawshank Redemption) -- Stephen King.