O. Henry!

Here's a fact I recently realized. I read really fast, lol. I mean, I've always known that. I grew up with my nose constantly in a book and over the years I trained myself to read quickly. But I've never timed myself before. Now because we're reading for a timed hour a night I know exactly how fast I read. The past three nights I've averaged over 120 pages an hour and that's with occasinal short distractions, like stopping to make silly sentences out of words on the page with the kids. That's a handy skill to have but it means that I'm going through books really fast! I started my second book last night and finished it this morning.

The book I just read was called These Things Hidden. I have really wide taste in books. I kind of get on tangents. I read only non-fiction for a while, then I only want to read cheesy religious novels for a while and then I get stuck on autobiographies and then I go through a YA streak for a while...I read a little bit of everything. The last two books were both contemporary fiction that had kind of similar themes and I just noticed that a good portion of the books I put on my "want to read" are more of the same. I guess that's just the mood I'm in. My focus will shift when I burn myself out on them and I'll move on to another genre!

But I can see that I'm going though them too quickly so I decided that I'm going to take a break from them and read something less quick and light. It will slow me down just a bit, which is good because I can't keep coming up with a new book every two days.

So now I'm reading Selected Stories of O. Henry. I've been a huge fan of O. Henry for many years. His stories are so clever with such unexpected endings. I've read most of what he has written at one point or another but it's been a long time. I'm excited to get back into it.

We decided that for our Year of The Books we would do Saturday reading activities. Instead of our normal reading hour we will try to do something else book related like going to the library, finding books to donate, learning about an author, etc. We probably won't be able to come up with an activity every single weekend but I'm hoping to do it often.

So today I decided to make our activity O. Henry themed. We all piled onto the couch and I read The Ransom of Red Chief to the kids. That story is hillarious, I've always loved it! Then we ate ice cream and watched the 1952 version of the story that I rented from Amazon.

It was an awesome activity, the kids loved it! O. Henry is a great way to introduce kids to classic literature. The stories are short, generally easy to understand (although we did learn a few new  vocabulary words in The Ransom of Red Chief today!) and the twists at the end are really fun. We had a great time and I'm pretty sure I'll be pulling O. Henry out again for the kids again. There are a few others that I think they'd really like.

So week one of our Year of the Books is going great! The kids are enthusiastic about it, we're plowing through books and having a lot of fun family time. I love it!! :)