Guest Post: Jenners the Book Whore

I am currently buried under family members, food, festival, and fun, so some kind bloggers have graciously agreed to guest post here on eclectic / eccentric.

Today, the wonderfully hilarious Jenners from Find Your Next Book Here shares her thoughts on eclectic reading.


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The Joys and Hardships of Eclectic Reading
I'm a book whore.

There ... I've said it. I'll read anything, anytime, anywhere. (Seriously, I've read the labels on cans of air freshener if trapped in a bathroom with nothing to read.) There is almost no type of book that I won't try. (Though I'd probably draw the line at technical books about subjects I know nothing about. I mean, let's be reasonable.)

It started when I was promiscuous young reader who had no barometer of what was "good" and what was "bad." I remember thrilling to the gloriously illicit and smutty The Love Machine by Jacqueline Susann and then following it up by reading the entire Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. I'd read Sidney Sheldon's Master of the Game alongside Joseph Heller's Catch-22. Danielle Steel followed by Stephen King. It was a big messy melting pot of books, and I loved it.

Oh sure, there were times when I'd go on reading binges and obsessively read one type of book. I had my murder mystery phases and my horror phases. But most of the time, I craved variety. If I read a "candy bar" book, I'd have to leaven the sweetness by reading a "vegetable" book. I continue this pattern to this day. After getting sick by binging on the candy bar brilliance of the Twilight books last year, I followed them by reading Jane Eyre for the first time (which I would liken to eating brussel sprouts).

On the flip side, my husband is very limited in his reading. He reads travel narratives and celebrity biographies recommended by the Howard Stern Show. (And the occasional Nelson DeMille book.) This type of limited literary diet would make me ill. I need my thrillers, my memoirs, my chick lit, my contemporary fiction, my essays, my literary fiction, my dystopian YA, my classics. Anything else would be unthinkable ... like living in a world that had only two colors.

However, the downside of an eclectic reading diet is the headaches you can induce by not choosing your books carefully enough. I mean, most people would not eat raw fish and then a big piece of chocolate cake, right? (Incidentally, I once did this. I don't recommend it.) This happened to me just a few weeks ago when I finished reading Justin Cronin's The Passage and then jumped into Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice. It was like getting reading whiplash. I should have picked a "step down" book ... something like Sense & Sensibility and Sea Monsters to ease myself out of the freaky viral-infested world of The Passage into the genteel world of Elizabeth Bennett's Hertfordshire.

Let's take a look at my list of books read this year and see some odd pairings that I read back to back. How about Steig Larsson's whip-smart and complex thriller The Girl Who Played With Fire followed by Jhumpa Lahiri's delicate, intricate and gorgeous short stories in Interpreter of Maladies? Or Stephenie Meyer's sci-fi epic The Host followed by Jonathan Safran Foer's experimental Holocaust-themed novel Everything Is Illuminated? Or my personal favorite odd pairing: Marcus Zusack's haunting, poetic WWII masterpiece The Book Thief followed by Jen Lancaster's snarky weight loss memoir Such A Pretty Fat? This seems like the reading list of a madwoman!

But my reading life is one big adventure. I never know where I'm going next. I could be kicking neo-Nazi ass in Sweden one week and then fighting vampires in San Francisco the next. I could be reliving an infamous school shooting and then seeing the world from a dog's point of view a few days later. I've luxuriated in the magical prose of Michael Chabon and then gone on to explore the science of the after-life. Being an eclectic reader means my reading journey has sharp turns, abrupt U-turns and lots of curves, but the journey is fascinating and feeds my soul and endless curiosity, and I wouldn't change a thing.