It's not just me...

I thought I was the only one...

The only one who couldn’t review books.

I love books and if I don’t read anything in a day the day feels incomplete...yet for the life of me I find rating books even books that didn’t catch my fancy as hard ... 

I feel completely inept in saying what I liked or disliked about a book. 

I had accepted it as one of my unworkable flaws till I read this...

“But while I can read Middlemarch and the Dunciad…as happily as anyone, I have this little region missing in my brain, that extra lobe that literature students possess as a matter of course, the lobe that allows them the detachment and the nerve to talk about books (texts they will say) as others might talk about the composition of a treaty or the structure of a cell. I can remember at school how we would read together in class an Ode by Keats, a Shakespeare sonnet or a chapter of animal farm. I would tingle inside and want to sob, just at the words, at the simple progression of sounds. But when the time came to writing that thing called an Essay, I flubbed and floundered. I could never discover where to start.”

“How do you find the distance and the cool to write in an academically approved style about something that makes you spin, wobble and weep?”

-Stephen Fry in Making History 

Of course there are books that I love and books that I leave without a thought...yet it seems somehow sacrilegious to sit down and note the good and the uninteresting parts.

There are many books that I dislike but I dislike them because I either have outgrown them or have never grown into them.

Love stories rank high in that list of dislikes.

I blame my mom’s collection of Woman’s Era for this!

My mom had a collection of these fabulous magazines…they must have been from the 1960’s because the ones she had were published in Britain. She took them out with her pile of other stored loves once a year…and those few weeks that they were aired I read them.

Stories that looked like this... though I don't know if this was from Woman's Era

The fact that I read them again and again very year from the time I was 6 to the time I was 15 made those short love stories and serials a part of me…so much so that when I was introduced to my first Mills and Boons in school I left it after the first few pages because I just knew what was going to happen in the next hundred odd pages and worse it was not as gripping!

Yes, fans would disagree with me but those earlier stories were indelible from my mind and after those years of immersion nothing ever came close to them.

So I love, love stories but have never grown into any other…