I'm currently smack dab in the middle of a Southern fiction work recommended to me by my fellow home group girls, entitled "The Secret Life of Bees." Upon hearing that the author, Sue Monk Kidd, has ties to Anderson (and South Carolina as a whole), I delved right in to find it at my local library, and then delved into its pages.
Though I am only 110 pages into it, I have found thus far that I am hooked, helplessly hooked. Overlooking the bad language and cruelty that flashes up now and then, I am taken aback at the lush, emotion-evoking word pictures that this lady paints in her pages. I mean, the scenes seem to drip with life off of the pages and into my brain. It is an easy read....by that, I mean it doesn't require as much concentration and brain power as some other books do....but it is still a notable read due to the graphic intensity with which Kidd writes.
Though I was not an abused or abandoned child, and though I never ran away from my home, I still see a lot of myself in the central character. I love it when books pull you in by giving you a tiny snippet, a glance, of yourself as a child.
I also love it when I finally get off of my busy "schedule" that I set up for myself and convince myself to crack open a book. The rewards always flood me more than I imagined....and I am always taken to a mini-vacation that I needed, not realizing that I needed a vacation at all.
Sitting outside in an adirondack chair, full glass of lemonade in hand, I float back in time and see myself years back doing the same thing....my freckled nose stuck in a new Babysitters' Club episode, one within the Mandie series popular in the Christian bookstores for a while. Or I see myself in Mom's lap as she would read me another chapter of a novel, promising me a warm brownie before I turned out the lights and went to sleep. I see me reading to my four-year-old sister her favorite book for over a year, "'There Are Rocks In My Socks,' Said the Ox to the Fox." Or my Grandpa in his recliner, showing my cousins and I the pictures after he read each page of "The Color Kittens." The more I think of it, books have always been an integral, vital part of my life.
Thank You, God, for books.
Though I am only 110 pages into it, I have found thus far that I am hooked, helplessly hooked. Overlooking the bad language and cruelty that flashes up now and then, I am taken aback at the lush, emotion-evoking word pictures that this lady paints in her pages. I mean, the scenes seem to drip with life off of the pages and into my brain. It is an easy read....by that, I mean it doesn't require as much concentration and brain power as some other books do....but it is still a notable read due to the graphic intensity with which Kidd writes.
Though I was not an abused or abandoned child, and though I never ran away from my home, I still see a lot of myself in the central character. I love it when books pull you in by giving you a tiny snippet, a glance, of yourself as a child.
I also love it when I finally get off of my busy "schedule" that I set up for myself and convince myself to crack open a book. The rewards always flood me more than I imagined....and I am always taken to a mini-vacation that I needed, not realizing that I needed a vacation at all.
Sitting outside in an adirondack chair, full glass of lemonade in hand, I float back in time and see myself years back doing the same thing....my freckled nose stuck in a new Babysitters' Club episode, one within the Mandie series popular in the Christian bookstores for a while. Or I see myself in Mom's lap as she would read me another chapter of a novel, promising me a warm brownie before I turned out the lights and went to sleep. I see me reading to my four-year-old sister her favorite book for over a year, "'There Are Rocks In My Socks,' Said the Ox to the Fox." Or my Grandpa in his recliner, showing my cousins and I the pictures after he read each page of "The Color Kittens." The more I think of it, books have always been an integral, vital part of my life.
Thank You, God, for books.
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