When I was younger, I read books beyond my age ability (that sounds like a poorly constructed phrase but I don’t have any other words for now). I remember my mother told me once that my teacher when I was nine said: “Is she able to read this? This is far beyond the vocabulary we are teaching her.” But I read it anyway. Or my mother did. I think she thought since I wasn’t English, the best way to gain a good grasp of the English language was to read. She was brilliantly right. From then on, my spelling was pretty good, I read whenever I had time and I wrote really well (on an academic level for my age, I am guessing).

When I read, I get obsessed, and find it hard to stop. I’m the type of person who reads so intently that when you call my name I wouldn’t be able to tell you, that time sort of stops and when I look at the clock it has probably been hours since I last looked up from the page, I read until my eyes hurt and I need a break. I do that when I’m watching television too, I guess I just get absorbed and find it hard to get back out. I remember when people used to race to finish reading ‘Harry Potter’. I read it when I was nine too I believe (that must have been my ‘reading period’) but no-one really know about the book then, so much than make a film about it. I read all seven books without missing a word, a chapter, skipping to the back and cheating. I cheat a lot if the story drags too much and I need to keep myself going with snippets from the back pages. It works sometimes, other times the story bores me completely and I never pick the book back up.

I never read books on the ‘recommended book’ list. All that ‘Catcher in the Rye’, ‘Animal Farm’ (I have it, I read half of it during the summer and never picked it back up again… I don’t think I particularly want to), ‘Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea’, and so on and so forth. I read a few classics, of course I did, mostly through education and when I was growing up, but I never picked them up out of self-will, unless I was prompted to by a friend, or probably someone pretentious in reading the ‘finer books in life’ (out of this, I’ve read ‘Peter Pan’, ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Great Expectations’… those are the only ones that stick, I have read too many books to actually remember what I have read). I never really understood why books had to be categorised like that. Surely a good book to one person may not be a good book at all to another, so grouping them to say ‘these are good books are these are bad books’ didn’t really make sense. I read mostly what I found interesting when I browsed the shelves. I have system of doing this, I’m guessing everyone has a different way of selecting a book to read.

Firsty, the title. The title snatches me right away. The one I’m currently reading is called ‘The Thirteenth Tale’. I have a thing for mysterious(er?) titles. Things that don’t involve a middle aged woman who has a mid-life crisis, works in a bad job, her love life is on hold and then, magically, by the end of the book, everything is solved: she has her man, her job is going great (or she quit) and she realises life isn’t so bad. Yuck. Secondly, I read the back (or the front nowadays, they seem to hide the summary on the inside cover at the front) and see what it’s about. Sometimes the title fools you into thinking it’s a decent book. I can usually tell if I want to read it by the first line of the summary. The one I’m reading now, made me buy it with the line: “fascinating, manipulative Isabelle, Charlie, her brutal and dangerous brother, adn the wild, untamed twins, Emmeline and Adeline”. I have a certain weak spot for dysfunctional families in secrecy. In fact probably anything involving secrecy and a mission to solve things. Thirdly, I always read the front page to see if the summary has fooled me too. Usually I pick pretty well, sometimes I fail terribly. It all depends.

That and the cover. I think I am a sucker for really nice covers on books.

I am a fiction reader, and within that I read a lot of crime. Mostly Victorian crime (my obsession with Jack the Ripper doesn’t seem to satisfy me enough that I need to read more about other murderers of the past). My favourite is a certain Lee Jackson, who writes in the style of the period, and actually has a website about Victorian welfare (which I think is amazing that he puts so much effort and devotion into the facts). I’m still waiting for this latest book to go paperback, because then I would have them all on paperback (I am meticulous like this). I read also in particular, vampire novels. I am an addict to Anne Rice. So when Twilight was told to me, I already shut the door on it and decided to never read, nor see the film after I found it was going to be made. I am particular with my vampire novels, mostly because there is something wonderful about them. Oh, and Goosebumps. I am seriously in love with that series. I have too many of them in my ‘mini library’ (a small room that used to be my bedroom, but is now just a place to put all my books and magazines). I read, nearly, all the Dan Brown books. There’s one I can’t really bring myself to read because the topic doesn’t interest me so much – I think this one’s called ‘Digital Fortress’ but I forget. Lemony Snicket tickles my satirical side, and I love it (in a way that Dickens fails to achieve, but only because he writes excessively long sentences… Victorians had a way of being long winded about things).

I’m leaving back to university today, so most of the train journey shall be reading, and probably lots of caffeine! I’ll start writing a bit more, not daily things, I have a diary for that, but things that are part of who I am… the Stephanie gene! I sound like a piece of molecule!