Reading Like a Velociraptor

I've always been a voracious reader.  

I love that adjective here. Voracious. Try moving your mouth around it's delightfully vicious syllables.  Now think of a Jurassic Park-style velociraptor attacking a book with his long, sharp, hungry teeth… ripping it to shreds, devouring it, grinning with the anticipation of a sated appetite as every bite goes down his craw.

That's how I read. I devour books with eager, hungry abandon:  getting what I want or need out of the book, not worrying if the odd bit or corner or sentence falls along the wayside. I eat each book up, feeding my hunger for stories, for knowledge, for understanding, for escape.

And yet, I've always struggled with literature classes, and continue to struggle with literary criticism or analysis.  I rarely come up with the "right" answers in class, and, more importantly, find that I just don't really care. 

 The best part of books, to me, is that they leave openings for the imagination to fill in the blanks and create the pictures.  A book is like a conversation: shaped as much by the nature of the listener/reader as by the words of the talker/writer.  The writing and storytelling of the author are certainly important, but their meaning for me, the reader, is shaped as I read by my own life experiences, sometimes even by the time and place I read any given sentence.  

Perhaps it's time to finally get around to finding a book club, to give me the extra excuse to find more time to read. 

Except for that part where I don't actually like to  discuss or critique books with a bunch of strangers, because it is a little too much like baring my soul...  

Maybe I can just bare my voracious velociraptor fangs instead. 

Or , you know, distract them with wine and cookies.

Some Good Reads...

Recent favorites :  The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern;  A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Currently reading : Little, Big by John Crowley

What good books have you read lately?