About

My name is Cathy and I've always had a passion for reading. My dad will tell you about coming home from kindergarten one day, so upset because I'd "forgotten" how to read. Turns out I'd just been memorizing my favorite books, haha. It didn't take long for me to learn to read for real though the consequence is that I still can go on an hour long rant about the computer vocabulary tests forced upon me from an early age*.

My dad is the one who instilled the love of reading in me. There's plenty of pictures of me as a toddler sitting next to him as he read me pages from whatever book he was in the middle of. One of my favorites was The Call of the Wild from which I made the momentous discovery of the word "the" and decided that my writing would greatly improve with the addition of this crucial word. Though reading with my dad did have it's challenges--I'm 26 years old and we still talk about one day finishing Heidi. We couldn't get past chapter 1.

When I read, I feel like I actually see the events taking place. I laugh and cry with the characters and when I've finished an especially emotionally charged book, I feel physically heartsick that it's over.

You'd think that my love of reading would make me an easy person to shop for (as you can see, I read a very diverse variety), but as "Stuff White People Like" (I think) can tell you, the odds of giving someone a book they 1) actually want and 2) haven't read yet is very difficult. For anyone looking to give me a book, though, check out my Goodreads account and pray I'm not reading your mind, haha. But for those of you who are friends with a reader who doesn't use Goodreads, this blog is here to help. These are gifts for the book lovers in your life. Items specifically picked because, to me at least, they do a great job representing the heart of the book in question.

Yes, I've read every book I've listed here. Some of my choices may disappoint some folks--do not judge me on the content of my Books Read List. I make a habit of reading books outside of my comfort zone to help me better understand people who are different from me.



*As a class, we took the "Star Reader Test" (I believe that's the name) 2 or 3 times a year. The first time it would be on par with whatever reading level you had from the year before, but the 2nd and 3rd time it would be a grade or two (or TEN in my case) above to see how well you've improved. I used to peek at my neighbors computer screens and marvel at how easy their words were while I was looking at words with a minimum of 4 syllables and I pretty sure there were Greek symbols! What no one wanted to tell me was that I was reading on a college level in 4th grade and yes, I was indeed seeing SAT quality vocabulary words. I guess I was a good guesser back then because by the time I took the SAT for real (I took it for fun every year starting in 8th grade) I still had no clue what those words mean (STILL DON'T!).

See--told you I could rant on it! I definitely say teach your kids to love reading, but let's be kind folks! Put them in a Latin or Greek language class too! Actually--I kind of enjoyed those vocabulary tests--I used to sit there grumbling to myself about needing a dictionary, but it was still an ego booster to know that someone thought I could figure out which archaic word belonged in the sentence. Plus, since I walked into it knowing it would be in the wrong language, I didn't care about "passing it" which made all other tests a bit less scary because I knew that at least I would have seen that content before. No test anxiety for me!