In a reading rut.

I've been in a reading rut. I have 25 books on my shelf that I've acquired in the last two months — all of them free but one. I try to branch out and read books that I normally wouldn't pick up. I started doing this about three years ago and have found new loves for different genres. My latest love has been for memoirs and biographies. But there has to be a point when you decide to give up on the book that just isn't doing it for you and shelf it for a later time. But when is that?

Once you've had those experiences of getting totally lost in a book and can recall the time when you read it, it's really hard to find another book that can do the same. 

I want to read all of these books on my shelf — someday. But I need something to stir up my reading emotions again. So I go back to my first love: dystopian fiction. This is George Orwell's 1984, The Hunger Games series, Lois Lowry's The Giver to name a few. 

Wendell Berry quote.

Finished a book I've had on my shelf for probably three years. It's called "Without Reservations: The travels of an independent woman," by Alice Steinbach. It's kind of like an "Eat, Pray, Love" but less about eating, praying and loving and more about the actual traveling, seeing and finding. On page 158 she quotes naturalist Wendell Berry:

"Always in the big woods when you leave familiar ground and step off alone into a new place, there will be, along with the feelings of curiosity and excitement, a little nagging of dread. It is the ancient fear of the Unknown, and it is your first bond with the wilderness you are going into."

Basically sums up how I felt leading up to and arriving in NYC. And I feel much better knowing that I wasn't the only one in the world feeling this way.