I live in The Suburbs and work in The City. If you do too, then you, like me, have time to kill every day. A few months ago I started working full-time in the city, and began slugging- excuse me, carpooling. So what do you do while you sit in someone else's car for 45 minutes (on a good day, I mean, it can take twice that time if there's any amount of traffic, and don't even get me started on when it rains or snows)? Listen to music, sure, that's definitely an option. Talk to the other passengers? Absolutely not. Watch I-395 go by? That gets old quick.
As a kid I read constantly. I loved fantastical stories. My dad would come into my room at the end of his workday and attempt to engage me in conversation, and if I was reading, he learned to leave in a hurry.
Through college, I hadn't read fiction hardly at all, what with one thing or another (working, getting my degree, you know, the little things). A year or so ago my friend gave me a book called Jhereg by Steven Brust, who is now my current favorite author. Getting into a new series caused me to reflect on my past reading habits. I liked to style myself as an 'avid reader' and lover of the fantasy genre, but really I had found maybe four series and stuck with them for years. In elementary school, it was Redwall by Brian Jacques and the Animorphs books by K.A. Applegate. In high school it was the Belgariad books by David Eddings and the Lord of the Rings books. Harry Potter was a constant. I read a few other books here and there, of course, but these were my main loves, and I kept coming back to them time and time again.
I have since decided to branch out. My project is to take a random book or three at a time from the library shelves, probably from the Fantasy/Sci-fi section for the most part, and read them. I am on a quest for good stories, for good fantasy. I've read a handful of these random books already and so far have been mostly disappointed, but I am liking the newness of every novel I pick up. It's refreshing.
I want to chronicle and review these books, mostly for my own reference. I hope to become a better reader and maybe a better writer, and more knowledgeable about fiction in general. I'd love recommendations, too, but part of the fun is just going to the shelves, finding a cover I like, making sure it's Book One if it's part of a series, and just going with it. I have about two free hours built in to my day now, why not use them for something I've been meaning to do for a long time?
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