I've been reading a lot lately. Ever since me and the fiance broke up, I've been throwing myself into books. Perhaps because he and I watched a lot of movies, but I think a lot of it is, books make me fully engage myself. Movies, I usually have to do a craft or fold laundry or something to keep from getting bored (a whole other post there), but books, I have to fully concentrate on what's going on.

I got really into the Star Wars books a few months ago. It's nerdy, I know, but this entire world created and detailed is really kind of fascinating. Plus, after the breakup, they were comfortingly devoid of romance. But alas, I caught up to the newest book in the sub-series I enjoy, and now have to wait until the next book is released at the end of this year. So Star Wars is done for the moment.

I've always enjoyed memoirs. I was thinking about why that was earlier today. I don't like biographies much, and I'm not really a non-fiction type of person, normally. But I love memoirs, because they are written by real people, who aren't always trained authors and who don't (hopefully) recreate their life just to tell a better story. It is what it is.

Despite my love of reading, I'm pretty selective on my choices. I don't have much patience for "the classics." Dickens, Shakespeare, even Hemmingway, I don't enjoy. They are too flowery for my taste, and I know it's mainly because they were written 200+ years ago, but I just don't enjoy taking an hour to read one page. I learned to read at an early age and I learned to read fast, because I enjoy the story, not individual words, and I want to find out what happened! That's why I love rereading books, because there are often things I skimmed over the first time. It's like a whole new book each time. Because my priority is the story, it makes sense that memoirs are interesting to me. It's someone telling of their life. Plain and simple. No allegory to interpret, no two-paragraph description of the freaking sunset, just the story. And you know what? There must be a lot of fantastic book editors and ghost writers out there, because there haven't been many memoirs that my critiquing mind has found issue with. I worked for a newspaper, and the average person is a crappy writer. They do too much or not enough, etc. A majority of my day was spent rewriting press releases to a readable format. I have a pretty careful eye and I've caught mistakes in many a paperback novelist's book (Danielle Steel is the worse when it comes to editing. It's like the editors just stamp it good to go without glancing at a single page), but rarely do I find glaringly obvious mistakes in memoirs, even more subjective issues like sentence structure or flow. Perhaps because this is someone's life. This is their legacy, if you will, not just the newest $7.98 Walmart paperback.

That's why I like memoirs. If someone is willing to take the plunge and tell me why their life is worth putting on paper, I'm willing to take a few hours to care.