My Favorite Hobbies (Other than my Writing, that is!)

This is my entry for the Photo Contest contest by crystalpacheco30

As it is with many writers, one of my favorite hobbies is reading. I have always loved reading and was known to spend hours and hours each day with my nose buried in a book. As a child in a very small elementary school, I read every single book in the library. When the school closed for the summer and got rid of "extra" books, I was there to haul them home for the summer.

I tend to go in spurts with reading different genres. My favorite go to is Time Travel (Diana Gabaldon's series is a long time favorite!) I love contemporary suspense, historical romance, mystery... and some more mystical themed stories as well. I welcome new book recommendations!

Most of my books come from the $1.00 shelf at the used book store. I read fast, and am generally on a very limited budget, so cheap books are a must. This means I generally don't keep up with current reads.

We have had to thin down our book collection many many times over the years. I'm not exaggerating when I say that we've sold or had to dispose of (we had a house that got infested with toxic mold) thousands and thousands of books over the last 2 1/2 decades of our marriage. MOST were able to just be sold, but everything from 'the moldy house' had to be disposed of. It was horribly depressing!

This is one of my current bookshelves:

_{My inner child shines through, even on my 'grown up bookshelves.}
If you could look closely enough, you'd see a YA novella that I published the same year I produced and directed a play of the same story that I also wrote as a screenplay (which is sitting right next to it in the form of DVDs from the play performances!) :)

_{The shelves next to my bed aren't quite as tidy}
These are the shelves that get used every night. They hold my sleep-headphones, my sleep masks and all of the things I've read most recently or am in the middle of reading at the moment. These shelves hold books, word puzzles (another favorite of mine) and two uncharged kindles... I guess you can see that I prefer books I can actually page through more than the electronic kind! I also have self help books that I page through, including some books to help work on my acting (which is yet another hobby of mine.)

_{The shelves next to the couch where I spent half of the last week being SICK... and doing a LOT of reading!}
The whole time I was sick, the computer screen and even the small phone screen killed my eyes, so paperbacks it was!

_{My bullet journal... where I need to update with the books I read this past week!}

And, of course, starting the next generation of readers! This is the "book drawer" in the grandkids room at my house. My youngest grandchild is a year and a half and the first thing he does every time he comes over is pull out all of his favorite books. Then he will sit down and page through each one until he's done. THEN and only then is it time to play :)

And to further foster the love of reading, I took this collection of the boys favorite stories and recorded the entire thing as an audiobook. I put it on this kid-proof MP3 player for the baby and on an old phone for the 3 year old. They love listening to it... but BOY, do I wish I hadn't put the 'train whistle' as a page turning prompt on all the recordings! The 1 1/2 year old likes to listen to the recording INSTEAD of me when he's over and it's nap time! I get SO tired of hearing that train whistle!

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art and flair courtesy of @PegasusPhysics

_{Horizontal ruler thanks to @cryptosharon}