Love is a Many-Splendoured Thing

Ahhh, February, the month of love… birds are singing, romance is in the air and anxious partners are panicking because there are no roses left in the supermarket.

Does love necessary mean romance though?

Love can mean so many things to so many different people. It can be our love for our partners, our children, our parents or our pets. It can be something that we are passionate about – a hobby, food or even a material object. We often say that we love something – I love to read, I love custard slices and I love my iPhone!

What do we love about books, about reading?

I love the way books make me feel. I can sit down with a book and lose my self in a new world of the author’s imagination. A book can make me feel happy, sad, angry, frightened, shocked, excited and amused. It can make me cry with happiness or sadness. I LOVE TO READ!

I have loved certain books so much that I have queued at midnight to get the next book in the series (the last three Harry Potter books). I have taken holidays off work to read a book that I have anxiously waited for (Harry Potter again). I get excited when I know a book by one of my favourite authors is being released (Indigo Spell by Richelle Mead is out this month, I can’t wait…). There are books that I will read over and over again because I love them sooooo much, for example, The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman. I love that book so much that I can’t explain why, I can’t speak about it… which leads me to….

Books have evoked such emotional reactions from me that my husband has sometimes worried about what disastrous thing has happened in the world. When a book evokes that kind of emotion, I can often be heard saying, “I am going to have to put it in the freezer!” For those of you who are Friends’ fans, you may know what this means, anyone else – I will tell you in the twitter reading group. Examples of my freezer books are:

• Jojo Moyes – Me Before You
• Jodi Picoult – My Sister’s Keeper
• Jenny Downham – Before I Die (now retitled, Now is Good)
• Winston Graham – The Angry Tide
• Alice Sebold – The Lovely Bones

Shout it out loud! I LOVE TO READ! Don’t be afraid to tell us what you love about books, what books you love and why you love them. Our twitter chat will be on Tuesday 26^th February, 8 p.m. Use the hashtag #NPTLove in your tweets and we look forward to chatting to you all!

Love,

Bethan  ♥