on my so much time

I've slowed down on book reviewing these days. I had yet another bump in the road in my personal life with an unexpected type 2 diabetes diagnosis. I now need to read nutrition labels quite closely, take blood from myself at least 3 times a day and be more deliberate about taking time to be physically active. I am lucky that I have a few people at my day job that I love hanging out with and am very fond of because i don't have a lot of time or energy to have a social life outside of my marriage these days. But the wake up call to make my health a priority and finding my sense of community in a job where the turn over rate is a constant reminder of the brevity of life. 

However this makes me even more hungry for the written word. My appetite for reading and buying books is still very strong. It's just that in the mist of wanting to take advantage of being around people while I have the privilege of having them in my life and needing to critically examine my lifestyle I have this need to turn off my critics eye sometimes when I open a book. I need to feel transported into a different world.

 I find myself laughing that I grabbed my Nightworms selection Blood Sugar to one of my doctors appointments. I splurge on a Once Upon A Book box to read Turn of the Key, which I found difficult to put down and was excited to get a nice mug and USB port in the boook box bringing moments in the story alive. I find it comforting to find a new used bookshop that has a great horror selection where I left with a stack of paperbacks and found myself reading Anne Rice's Witching Hour within a weekend. A friend of mine acted jealous that I could read such a long book so quickly. However I know that part of my motive was that this was a place I could escape while feeling tired by myself on my couch. And despite how quickly I read that I still manage to buy books faster than I can read them. However being surrounded by stacks of books makes me feel like I am living my life fully. I will not stop thinking about the things I read, however I am so excited to be transported into the next world. There is also something about the solitary act of reading and being transported into a world alone that makes me feel like I took a much needed retreat from the world before facing the realities of my day to day life again. But the truth is that I am not trying to escape my reality. Rather I am trying to find ways to make my otherwise quiet mundane moments enjoyable.