Top Ten Tuesday: Reading Memories

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is reading memories. It’s story time! Grab your cookies and your juice box. I’m going to tell you about all the places I’ve read books. (You’re excited, I can tell.)

Reading Memories

I read The Tommyknockers in a trailer . . .

A lot of my schooling wasn’t done in actual school buildings. Our classrooms were doublewide trailers dumped in fields. I read my first Stephen King book in one of these trailers. I was eleven years old when I snuck The Tommyknockers out of my parents’ bedroom and brought it to school with me for silent reading time. I fell in love with Stephen King in a hot, dimly lit trailer that always smelled like string cheese for mysterious reasons.

I read Life of Pi outside . . .

When I was younger, my family camped a lot. One summer, Life of Pi was my “camping book.” I dragged it all over the wilderness with me. I remember finishing it in some random botanical garden and being completely shocked by the ending.

Me, camping and reading. The book in that photo is The Handmaid's Tale, but you get the idea.

I read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince at driving school . . .

Half-Blood Prince came out when I was a teenager. I brought the book to driving school with me so that I could read on my breaks instead of socializing with the other kids like a reasonable person. Our driving instructor saw me reading it, and we ended up spending our breaks talking about Harry Potter. He was just as obsessed with the series as I was.

(Oh, this reminds me of a tangent: My driving instructor was a strange dude. When we got to the actual driving part of school, he treated our driving lessons like therapy sessions. He told me about his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s angry daughter. The daughter was the same age as me. Her mother had an affair with my driving instructor. (Yuck.) The daughter blamed my instructor for ruining her parents’ marriage. He kept asking me for advice on getting the daughter to forgive him. I don’t know, dude! If you keep blathering about your love life, I’m steering this car off a cliff.)

I read “On the Rainy River” in a college commons . . .

This is an excellent short story by Tim O’Brien. It’s about a young man who gets drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. At the end of the story, he’s in a boat on the Rainy River, staring at Canada and wondering if he should run. I rarely get anxious while reading, but this story made me so anxious that I had to put it down. I was completely freaking out while everyone around me was eating, sleeping, studying, goofing around, being college people.

I read Jane Eyre while almost dying . . .

This was my first solo camping trip. Actually, it wasn’t really solo because my dog, Kota, was with me. We were high up in the Rocky Mountains, and there was a massive lightning storm in the middle of the night. I had never been that close to lightning before. It kept hitting the mountaintops around us. I was close enough to see where it was striking the ground. I was trying to read Jane Eyre with a flashlight while hugging Kota and thinking Kota, if we die in this place, please don’t hate me in the afterlife.

I took this photo the morning after the storm. You can tell that we got tons of quality sleep.

I remember what was on my nightstand when my dogs died . . .

We didn’t die in the lightning storm (spoiler alert), but Kota died from a stroke a few years later. When he died, the book on my nightstand was The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (which is morbidly appropriate, now that I think about it). When my other dog, Cheyenne, died from cancer earlier this year, the book on my nightstand was The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami.

Kota (left) and Cheyenne (right).

I read Fifty Shades of Grey in the world’s most disgusting dorm room . . .

The cringe-worthy book matched my cringe-worthy setting! Like Fifty Shades, my dorm was seriously gross. It had no heat or air conditioning. It was always really loud. And it was infested with swallow bugs. Before I got in bed to read, I had to shake my sheets and shake my book to knock the bugs out.

The University posted these notes when people were like, "Um, why is this place gross?"

 

I read The House of the Scorpion in a sandstorm . . .

While hiking in Death Valley, California, we got caught in a sandstorm and had to hurry back to the hotel. The sand was blowing so hard that it stung my skin. I still have scratches on my glasses from that storm. The sand got inside my camera and killed it. It almost killed our rental car, too. The sandstorm is one of the coolest things I’ve ever experienced, but being out in it was quite unpleasant. That’s how I ended up reading The House of the Scorpion while watching a sandstorm through the window of a hotel.

To the hotel! Quickly!

Selfie. This is when I learned that my hair can be used as a storage space for 10 pounds of sand.

I failed to read The Stepford Wives in an airport . . .

Why are there so many friendly old people in airports? It was early in the morning, and I was waiting for my flight from Kentucky to Colorado. I just wanted to read my book and drink my caffeine. A friendly southern gentleman sat next to me and gave me a long lecture on how the weather in Kentucky differs from the weather in Colorado. I didn’t get any reading done, but I probably learned something about weather patterns. Maybe. I was mostly asleep, to be honest.

Photo I took in Kentucky.

Have you read a book in an interesting place?