They are my guilty pleasure.  My beach read.  My no-brainers.  And I'm not ashamed to admit it.  I love cozy mysteries.  Give me a whodunnit set in a bed and breakfast/ English country house/ museum/ university/ small town/ bakery/ tea shop/ book store/ library with an amateur sleuth who has no skills or training but always figures out the bad guy before the police, and I'll choose it every time.

Like so many things that have changed over the years, my love of reading and turning to it in times of stress has undergone a major transition.  For so many years, reading was a daily passion; it was the past time I fit into every day, and I felt incomplete if I didn't read at some point in every day.  My love of reading led me to choosing English as my major in college, and I spent several years focusing on reading Victorian novels.  No matter how much I had on my plate during my studies, I was always reading another novel of some kind at the same time as all of my school books.  Reading has seen me through some tough times in my life; hiding in a bookstore or library, choosing my next read, finding time to forget my woes and lose myself between the pages were all I needed to relax, unwind, and find some peace.


At some point over the last two or three years, reading has stopped working in this way for me.  I'm not sure if it's a different level of stress or different kinds of stressful events, but now I can't shut it out and get into the book.  The bad stuff just keeps rearing its ugly head.




I haven't finished a book in over a month.  I'm staring at quite a nice to-be-read pile, but I haven't cracked a cover.  You can tell by the books, that I have eclectic taste, but I stick to some clearly defined genres.  I love mysteries or crime fiction, or whatever you want to call it, but I don't care for true crime. I do like non-fiction specifically about fashion and the history of fashion, any thing associated to motivation, and organization.  I also try to always have one classic that I read bits and pieces of since I find that I rushed through so many of them getting them read for assignments that I didn't have the chance to just enjoy them.





Writing this has helped me focus on just how good the books in my stack look.  Since it's my birthday, I'm looking forward to sitting back maybe with a beverage or two, and getting lost in a good book.

It seems like such a silly thing to be stressed over, but I'm in a reading slump.  It's probably because I'm stressed about a lot of different things right now really, but this seems to be the straw that is breaking the camel's back.  I have always read as my way of making my self feel better when I'm sick or down, as a way to relax after a hard day, or as the way to fill the hours and take my mind off of things when I'm stressed.  I always read at bedtime; it's my way of winding down.  I take a book with me to appointments to fill the time in waiting rooms.  I can read in the car, so when I'm the passenger on a road trip, I have a book.

I started blaming this slump on the last book I read, which I wrote about here.  The Robert Crais book actually depressed me quite a bit, so to combat that, I picked up an easy comfort read, Back to School Murder by Leslie Meier, the next in her series, which I've already told you about here.  These books are like comfort food to me: they have a likable main charter who is far from perfect, they don't take too much thought, and I find Lucy's juggling of motherhood, working to make ends meet, and loving but being annoyed by her husband amusing and realistic.