books

I was never into books as a child; life was far more exciting - climbing trees and playing cowboys and indians in the woodland at the bottom of our road with the two boys who lived a few houses away from mine!
And so it wasn't until I was in my thirties that I started reading books, especially non-fiction when I trained to be a counsellor. But I was also encouraged to read novels by one of our lodgers. I think I jumped in at the deep end by starting with John Fowles' 'The Magus'!
When I felt called to the ministry I started devouring books and so my collection of books grew to a wall full and that was just in my study! There were full bookcases all over our house.
When we were preparing for our move to Wales, we thought we would be down-sizing and took many books to a second-hand book shop in Brighton, who bought many of them because they had beautiful covers - it didn't seem to matter what was on the inside! What we didn't sell we took to the local charity book shop and the theological ones - several boxes full, went to the church we were leaving.
Having been in Wales a couple of years we found a house just as large and having been called to be minister, the bookcases have been filled once again! But I was aware that my breadth of reading was not very wide and to encourage myself, and meet and get to know more folk in the village, I joined the book club.
Yesterday we discussed our latest read of 'Shutter Island', which has been made into a film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio which some of our group had also seen this week on TV. Apparently, if you have not read the book the film is difficult to follow, but it is quite true to the original story.
We had an interesting discussion about mental health, especially as one of our group had worked in a psychiatric hospital. 
Our next read is 'The Clan of the Cave Bear', which some of the group read many years ago but seems to be one of those books that can be re-read. 
We are having a holiday shortly so that will be my holiday read!