I’ve always been a reader, and a fairly quick reader, too.  I don’t often retain a lot when it’s a novel, but I use highlighter pens and colored ink when it’s a book I do want to remember details of. In the past few weeks, I’ve read the following:

Maeve Binchy, novel, A Week in Winter (so-so)

Elizabeth Berg, two novels, A Year of Pleasures (love it, second time I’ve read this one) and Say When (okay)

Nicholas Sparks, a novel, See Me (okay, a mystery more than his usual relationship type book)

Kahlil Gibran, spirituality sort of, The Prophet, (spectacular, best book ever!, have read it dozens of times)

Natalie Goldberg, spirituality, Long Quiet Highway, Waking Up In America, (a little hard to get into but quite good once you do, about her search for inner peace, studying Buddhism and Zen, and on writing).

Since I want to write (as evidenced by this blog, and the book I have in mind), here are a few of the key concepts from Goldberg’s book:

Writing is a way to connect with our own minds, to discover what we really think, see, and feel, rather than what we think we should think, see, and feel. (p71)

(about good teachers) … learning from the whole person, not from a lecture in front of a class… (p83)

Only something alive can die. (p84)

The funny thing is you don’t learn how not to think, you slow down and let thinking be thinking, walking be walking, crying be crying, dying be dying, and writing be writing. (p91)

Oh, yes, I do love to read.  And to think.