Why I Love Reading| CarenzaOnBooks

Reading has been a part of my life for as long as I could remember. As a child, my parents would have to prize books out of my hand to get me to sleep and once they had left the room, I would go and find them again. Reading was something I enjoyed and, growing up just as social media was beginning to expand, reading was the only way I had to entertain myself as a child.

I've always had a bookshelf in my room. As a child, it held all the Beatrix Potter books I owned and I would read the ones I enjoyed the most over and over. When I got my first CD player, I would fall asleep to the sounds of audiobooks. I've lost count of how many times I listened to Juliet Stevenson read me Jane Eyre. If the CD finished, I would climb down from my bunk bed and put the next CD on.

Coming from a family of readers, you could say that reading was in my blood. Some of my fondest memories of my childhood are reading the Harry Potter books with my family and listening to them on road trips to various holiday destinations across the country. When I would stay at my Gran's house, I would demand that she read me a book before I'd go to sleep.

Books have been something I've gravitated towards more and more in recent years. With the recent book to movie adaptations of The Hunger Games, Divergent and City of Bones, my eyes were opened to the world of YA. For my 15th and 16th birthday, I went book shopping and picked up so many books I want to read...let's ignore the fact that half of them are still unread.

While YA is the main age range I read, I have started to read more modern fiction such as the Poldark series. I've also started to love reading scripts as a part of my passion for the theatre. The last two years, I've only read 60 books a year. But now, I've read almost 40 and we're not even halfway through the year.

To answer the title of this post, why I love reading, simply, there is nothing quite like it. Books will be there on days when I feel like no one is and I can travel to far away places from the safety of my bed. As Stephen King says "books are a uniquely portable magic".
Carenza x

April Favourites| CarenzaOnBooks

Another month has come and gone, which means once again it's time for a favourites post. April, to me, seemed to vanish in a blink of an eye. I feel like I spent the majority of it revising as my exams slowly but surely creep up on me. As far as favourites go, there wasn't that much new things in my life, so a lot of these will have featured in past favourites posts. I also have a confession- there will be no book favourite for the month as I had an awful reading month and didn't particularly enjoy any of the books I read. 

Culture

I went to London on my first solo trip to see The Kiss of the Spiderwoman- a new adaptation of a play that was once a book, but then it was a film and briefly a musical. It stared Samuel Barnett, who played Dirk Gently in the Netflix adaptation. I knew very little about it before going, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Sadly, it was only on for a short amount of time and is no longer being performed. 

Even though I saw it on the very last day of April, I've decided to include it in my April favourites and that is Avengers: Infinity War. I'm not as invested in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but this film was one of the best ones and definitely didn't end how I thought it would. I am looking forward to the films to come.   

Bits'n'Bobs

I'm not really a clothes/fashion person, but in April I picked up two new clothing items that I love. The first is a black denim jacket from the Men's section at New Look. As we are transitioning towards the warmer months in the UK, I needed a lightweight jacket for those days when it was still on the cold side. I love it to pieces and it's become a staple piece of clothing in my wardrobe.

The next item was something out of my comfort zone- a mustard yellow jumper. I wasn't sure if yellow was a colour that looked good on me, but I've come to love it and for once it adds a bit of colour to my wardrobe (I'm a monochrome kind of gal). But the reason I picked it up was because it says Avid Reader's Club on it. I had been looking for something that expressed my love of books and this was the perfect thing.   

So that concludes my rather short April favourites, I can't promise that May will be a better month, but once my exams are over, everything should go back to normal (ish).

Carenza x