Reading

When I was 16, my family drove from Shelley, Idaho to Madison, Wisconsin for vacation. My father had a good friend there, and we would visit Oshkosh, drive the scenic route, and camp on Lake Michigan. My dad owned the largest Dodge passenger van in existence to transport our family of nine. We drove through Yellowstone National Park, across Wyoming to the Black Hills, Wall Drug, through the Badlands, across South Dakota, endless corn fields along the bottom of Minnesota and into Wisconsin, 1425 miles. One of my sisters, my parents and I took driving shifts through the night. We stopped to eat sandwiches from the cooler, for an occasional bathroom break, and once out of sheer exhaustion, we parked in a rest stop and threw our sleeping bags out in the grass until the sun came up.  But for me, many of those miles were spent hunkered down under the bench seat in the back, reading. The end of the school year had been about the Russian authors, and I had just finished Anna Karenina and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. For the trip, a friend had lent me the Piers Anthony Blue Adept series that I blew through and followed up with Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series. It became a summer of dragons, magic and alternate universes. When we returned, I followed my reading tangent into the universes of Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Larry Niven, Frank Herbert, Richard Matheson, and Robert Heinlein. As I recall 1981, those books were the best part of my summer. Much of my current list on Goodreads is for my MFA curriculum requirements with a few exceptions slipped in. I just can't resist a good story.

CURRENTLY READING: Sherri's bookshelf: read More of Sherri's books »