A Bookaholic

"Hi my name's Jackie, and I'm a bookaholic"

(Hi, Jackie)

"Its been four hours since I finished my last book, and I'm not sure how much longer I can go.  I've got 4 books on my bookshelf right now and another waiting to be picked up tomorrow..."

But seriously people, I've got a problem.  I average about a book every 3 days, and that's only because I do occasionally have to participate in the real world and do things like work and go to class.  During the summer, I average a book and a half a day.  Yeah, it's bad.

How can I help it though when I've got such easy access to so many books?  Not only do I have all the books my family has collected in the past 25 years, but then there's regular book stores, $1 book stores, summer book sales, the LA county library, the online database for the library, and Goodreads behind it all telling me there are more books out there then I could ever hope to read!  I guess a part of me started to realized I'd have to join the real world soon and started consuming as many books and stories as I could before it was too late.

Now, I'm a English Literature major, so I get my fill of "classics," and I genuinely enjoy those.  (It's hard to find me a book I don't enjoy.  If you've got some sort of plot line and a little character development, I'll bite).  However, left to my own devices for so long, I tend to lean toward the Young Adult genre and toward the paranormal, fantasy, and sci-fi divisions of that.

But because I acknowledge that I have a problem, I've decided that since I read a lot more than any normal person does to begin with, I should start being constructive in my reading habits.  Does that mean I'm going to give up my dirty vampire books? No, definitely not.  What it does mean is that I'm aiming at 1 out of every 10 books I read coming from my learn to live life shelf, or as I've labeled it, my "quarter-life-crisis" shelf, because that is honestly what I'm going through.  This shelf is a compilation of reading lists I've found with names like "20 Books for Girls in Their 20s" and "Career Books Every Young Woman Needs to Read."  1 in 10 may seem like I'm not going to get anywhere, but what that really translates to is about 1 of these books every other week.  I've already read half the books on these lists, but the other half of them and I are about to become very closely acquainted.  Those are the books that I'll probably chat about here (because really, if I don't write something about books, then I'm not talking about a very large part of my life).