The Reading Me

I've decided I need to start posting here. I've been having fun the past month with the sidebar, keeping track of books I've read, books I'm reading, a few links I like, but I've been avoiding this first post. I have a case of that writer's block one feels when looking at a blank page. I imagine everything I want here, and I can't do it all at once, and so I don't do it at all.

Well, today I'm doing it. Here I am. I'm Caryl: a woman in my late 30s, partner to dh, former middle school English teacher, at-home mother to dd and ds, ages 6 and 1. And I'm Caryl: booklover. I expect I'll show all of these sides of myself in this blog, but my booklover self is the part of me who has decided to create it.

My mom likes to joke that my brother's favorite toys were balls, my sister's, dolls, and mine, books. She says I started to read by age three. Some of the first books I remember reading: First Delights by Tasha Tudor, Wild Animals by Brian Wildsmith, those cute little Beatrix Potter books. Some chapter books my mom read aloud to us: Mandy by Julie Edwards, The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. I spent much of my teenage years with my nose in a book; favorites: The Luckiest Girl by Beverly Cleary, Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster, The Pigman by Paul Zindel. In high school, I was introduced to Great Literature, and fell in love: Keats and Shelley, Hamlet and Antigone, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Pride and Prejudice, Rebecca. In college, I pursued everything from Edna St. Vincent Millay's poetry to Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume.

Someday I'll make a list of my favorite reading experiences and post it here.

Now that I've introduced the reading me, I'd like to explain what I hope to do with this blog. I will share my thoughts about books here: books I'm reading, books my kids and I share, books I'm hearing about, reading goals I have and other book-inspired thoughts. In the sidebar, I will keep a running list of books I am working my way through. I will include some favorite links, some book-related and some not.

I want to let this blog evolve, to see where it takes me. So far, it has made me a bit more disciplined about my reading; just keeping some book lists here this last month has encouraged me to write and record more in my reading journal.

My blog name, "Leaning Tower of Books," is a silly way to remind myself that I have a precious bunch of reading material I want to get through. I'm afraid my tower of books will always lean, and often threaten to topple, but if I continuously give it the care and attention deserving of a work of art, it can be a quirky, loveable monument to my reading passion. Leaning is a good thing, as long as I keep an eye on it.

Off to update my sidebar, as I finished another book last night. I love that feeling!