Nancy Drew, and ugly crying

I used to love reading books when I was young. I was the kid that had to be told to put down the book and go to bed, or to clean my room, to do my homework, go to school. My favorite part of elementary school was library time. I was really into to mystery books then. Nancy Drew was a bad ass-  I had almost every yellow spined book and I was very meticulous about arranging and rearranging them in numerical order. Basically, then, everything but reading was an obligation.

In the last 20 years, time has gotten scarce, life has gotten crazy and weird, and kind of a lot to handle sometimes. I don't have homework anymore, but now I'm self employed so that basically means that my entire day is a long homework assignment that was due yesterday. I don't have to clean my room, now I have an entire house to clean and I actually like doing it. I stress out about things like life insurance and retirement... and what the right work/ home life balance is, which is extra alarming because I work at home and all that gets kind of tangled together. I've lost my yellow Nancy Drew books. I don't even have a book shelve to rearrange because we have iPads and kindles, and amazon.com is the only library I go to now.... which makes browsing for books less magical and more "I should add some toilet paper to my cart before I forget".

But a few years ago I discovered audio books, and they have saved my life from the mundane of long drives and bad tv shows. I listen while I cook, I listen while I drive, I listen in waiting rooms. My taste in books have changed considerably from Nancy Drew, but I do still love a good mystery. My favorite book read last year was A Man Called Ove. It was one of the first as I was getting back into the throes of reading again. And it knocked me on my ass. As in, its been almost a year since I read the book and I still don't know what I can say about it except it's a wonderfully tender story about loneliness, and despair and hope. The novel is funny, heartbreaking, poignant, and it had the most perfect and satisfying ending, to which I ugly sobbed for about an hour. I've read (I mean heard?) quite a few books since then, and all I know is the books that I love the most are the ones that make me cry. Like a lot. Like bawling over my simmering spaghetti sauce, or ugly crying so hard driving down the road that I think I should probably pull over because the roads are getting blurry and fellow drivers are probably thinking that I just found out my long lost Aunt Lorene died. The catharsis is real, guys.

I think the lesson learned here, is that I like stories that transport me to another place and another life. Ones where I find so many similarities to my own, that it's comforting to know my wants and struggles are shared. And stories of people so different that me, that I can understand the vastness of our world and the people in it. And those stories just happen to make me ugly cry.

Let's sob it out, together, guys.