Rediscovering the joy of reading

Everyone says writers need to read anything and everything they can get their hands on.

I’m sure they’re right. When I was younger, my nose was always buried in a book. Reading was my favorite free-time activity.

Nowadays, with a full-time job and a Boyfriend, I have a lot less free time. The time I do have tends to be devoted to things like cooking, eating or playing online. Most of my reading is confined to blogs. A few of them deal with writing, but since I’m still trying to lose about 50 pounds, the majority are healthy living blogs.

As a result, I know about 500 workout tips and 1,002 different ways to make oatmeal — good for my diet/health, but it doesn’t do much for my creativity.

The precious little time I have left after working and taking care of the business of life, I tend to want to spend writing my own books, not reading someone else’s. Sure, I tweet my #FridayReads when I think about it — but if you’re paying attention, you’ll notice I often  tweet the same book several weeks straight.

But with so many of my Starcatcher sisters’ stories hitting the market, there are a lot of great new reads I don’t want to miss. I’d start naming some of them, but I’m afraid I’d miss too many. We’re a talented group.

With e-readers putting books at my fingertips 24/7, there’s no excuse not to read them. I already own a Nook, and I finally broke down and put the Kindle app on my phone, too. Now I can download some of the free books tweeted by some of the authors I follow.

Since downloading the Kindle app, I’ve devoured GH winner Laurie Kellogg’s “A Little Bit of Deja Vu” and am more than halfway through Juli Alexander’s “My Life as the Ugly Stepsister.”

I’ve been sneaking a few pages while standing in line at the grocery store and bank, or while I’m in the bathroom at work. (Shh … don’t tell.)

Now that I’m reading books as often as blogs, I look forward to crossing a lot more titles off my TBR list. You can follow my reads — and my progress on the 2012 reading challenge — on Goodreads. (I originally set a goal of 26 books for the year, but now that I’ve rediscovered the joy of reading, I hope to read a lot more than that.)