I love to read, man!

All my life I've loved to read. My first memory of reading was asking my dad to read the comics from the Sunday paper to me because I didn't know how to read yet. Sure, I could look at the pictures and imagine what Dagwood said to Blondie, but I wanted to know what those letters said, spelled out in the balloons above Beetle Bailey's and Sarge's heads. I picked it up--that mysterious world of the printed word--soon thereafter and was proudly part of the group Mom deemed as having "her nose in a book."

I've spent my whole life reading. I've always read for a living one way or another. I've done everything from typesetting to proofreading to copy editing to technical writing (gag me with a computer manual), and have always been happiest when I go to bed at night and read for at least an hour before going to sleep. In fact, last year in 2009, I read 53 books, mostly fiction but some nonfiction slipped in by choice and a few by bribery (I was paid to read them).

My personal list of books I've read isn't earth-shattering. My tastes run from Nick Hornby to Anita Shreve to Lorna Landvick to Elizabeth George. It all really depends on what I'm in the mood for. Nonfiction choices tend to memoirs like the first book I finished in 2010, Valerie Bertinelli's latest, Finding It. I'm nosy, plain and simple. I also recently read Melissa Gilbert's Prairie Tale (what a slut!) and can get lost in tales of long ago told by great storytellers like Erik Larson (Thunderstruck, Isaac's Storm, Devil in the White City).

Book Read:  Finding It And Satisfying My Hunger for Life Without Opening the Fridge 
Author:  Valerie Bertinelli
ISBN:  978-1-4391-4163-2

So, this first entry of my new blog includes the first book I finished in the new year (I started it last year):  Finding It by Valerie Bertinelli. I thought it was okay, just okay. If I had to rate it, I'd give it a 6 out of 10 stars. I didn't read Losing It, which chronicled her battle to lose 40 pounds using the Jenny Craig program. Finding It is about maintaining her weight, which, as she says, is harder some days than it was losing it in the first place. I image so. I don't know. I could stand to lose 40 pounds and admire the fact that she did it so publicly.

But this was a lightweight book (literally too, with 270 pages, of which many were called Notes to Myself where she wrote little ideas that occurred to her at some point, sometimes relevant and sometimes sort of out there, which is allowed, I suppose in an autobiography format). Interesting but could be skipped.