Reading is the new Prozac

I love to read, always have done. From a tender age I would take myself off to the library and stand there like the proverbial kid in a candy store dithering over which books to choose. When I was little I read all the childrens' classics, Black Beauty, Little Women, Pollyanna etc. As a teenager I worked my way through authors, George Orwell, John Windham, H G Wells and various WW1 poets (what can I tell you- I was a calluos youth) But now I find that my reading tastes are far more eclectic.

I really enjoy Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett and Malcolm Price but I am just as excited to see that there is a new Reginald Hill or Ian Rankin on the bookshelves. My only criteria for reading a book these days is that it has to be in paper back and not too thick otherwise when it drops from my hands after I have fallen asleep reading it will wake the house up! You see my reasons for reading have changed somewhat over the years. Where as when I was younger I read for pleaure or enlightenment I now read to escape. It is the only way I know to switch off from the trails and tribulations of the day without resorting to Prozac, just as addictive though, I find that I just can't drop off unless I've read at least one chapter of my current novel.

At the moment I'm rereading Arms and the Women by Reginald Hill. I don't often read a book more than once due to the belief that there are so many books just waiting to be read and not enough years in a lifetime to read them all, but I was tidying one of the bookcases and realised that I couldn't remember the ending of this particular story so thought, why not give it another go. I now know why - poor old Reg must have been having some kind of writers mid life crisis when he wrote it.

As well as the usual Daziel and Pascoe romp he has also included Ellie Pascoe's tentative attempts at writing second novel - think Troy set in mid Yorkshire - in the middle of the plot. Ok I can see where he is going with this, I don't like it but what the hell it's his book but what is really starting to rankle is the feeling that he is patronising me with the use of words that I have to look up in a dictionary to find out their meaning. For example he uses the following sentence to describe how the 'baddie' from MI5 reviews Ellie's draft novel - Occasionally as he read, his lips pursed in distate at some jarring anachronism or sciolistic inaccuracy. Is the joke on me? Does he mean when using sciolistic in this context to mock the character's vocabulory or mine? I don't know, and at 11.30pm I don't care