Image: Cover photo of Love: A novel of grief and desire
I promised last week that I would have exciting news to share about Love. Well, here it is: on September 8th and 9th the kindle edition of Love will be available for $0.99! Tell your friends. Or better yet, gift them a copy! Did you know that you can buy a kindle edition of any available book and send it to someone? When ordering, select the option to purchase as a gift for someone else. You can then email a gift code to anyone (it helps if they have an email address) and they can download (it helps if they have the kindle app) the kindle edition of the book for free. And read it. It's a great way to gift books. No wrapping, no trips to the post office, no postage.
There are a couple people I have to thank for my love of reading. My mom--who turned 89 this summer--took the time to read to us all the time when we were little. That was quite a feat considering Mom had four boys in six years. Our upbringing was part The Sound of Music and part The Lord of the Flies. We were either hiking through the hills, valleys and creeks of northeast Ohio or we were off in the woods torturing ourselves to maintain our place in the family hierarchy. It was usurp or be usurped. As son # 2, I had to attack up and defend down, often at the same time. In the midst of all that chaos, however, Mom found time to read with each of us, separately, so we could read the books we loved. She set me on a life-long journey.
My third-grade teacher, whose name is lost to me, took the time to bring me books from the library because I was reading so far ahead of my class. Our school did not have a library of its own, and the books in the librarymobile were for elementary school kids and not for me. She started me off with Black Beauty and never stopped the whole year.
My love of owning books began the first time I went to a Scholastic Book Fair at school. The opportunity to pick out books of my own, and to know I would be able to keep them forever--unfortunately, I've lost them all-- amazed me and turned me into a book lover, not just a reader. For many years I picked new books not by the cover but by the book's width. I hated the idea of a book ending too quickly; if I was going to immerse myself in a new world, I wanted to stay there for as long as possible. I read so quickly as a teen that when we went to the library every couple of weeks, I would borrow 12 - 15 books at a time and read them all before we went back. And I would also go to the bookstore whenever we went to the mall and buy at least one book while I was there. My greatest joy on a summer day was climbing a tree and reading my books out of sight of my brothers. It sure beat mowing the lawn!
Being a college English major (B.A. and M.A.) ruined me as a reader. This idea of close reading is nonsense. It now takes me an hour to read the Sunday comics! I have to admit it took me six years to finish undergrad and twelve for Grad School, so maybe I was already a slow reader. I always thought it was getting married and having kids and working, but who knows.
I normally close with a note on how you can enter a monthly drawing to win a FREE copy of Love: A novel of grief and desire, but when you can now buy your very own kindle edition for just $0.99, it seems silly to worry about getting a copy for free.
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