Kindle-napped

I'm willing to be that if you had a room full of PR professionals and asked them what they are currently reading, you'd get a room-ful of non-hesitant, truthful answers. If I had been in that room, I'd have gotten red faced and sweaty and been racking my brain for a semi-current answer.

I hadn't read a book for leisure since 2005 and the shame of being a communicator and writer who got annoyed with reading was immense. Growing up, I was so intensely nerdy and book wormy that I actually took my copy of Gone With the Wind to the first day of middle school because I was convinced it would be just aces for my popularity. (Note to soon-to-be middle schoolers everywhere, this strategy does not work).

As much as I loved the feeling of waking up early just to get in an extra chapter or two, sometime (conveniently around age 21) I stopped wanting to read for fun. A good book was just to hard to find and happy hour specials were not. I've never been the type who enjoys a good challenge when it comes to my hobbies.

Turns out, I'm super picky about what qualifies as a good book.

• No aliens. (Thanks to a traumatic trip to the planetarium when I was 6, this is an across-the-board rule for my life. No aliens ever.)
• No end-times talk. 
• No stuffy biographies.
• No crime or legal drama. 
• No characters or places or situations that are vaguely described in the beginning, so I picture them one way and it turns out in Chapter 4, they are further defined into some one/place/thing that hardly resembles what I imagined.
• Preferably no sappy sadness. I'm looking at you, Nicholas Sparks.
• Definitely no scenes so violent and disturbing that I'll be scared for life. (True story: A friend was telling me how good Hunger Games was and her simple two-sentence description left me with night terrors for a month.)
• Lots of funny.
• Lots of pretty sentences. Not flowery-pretty, but well-written pretty.

So, I'm a high maintenance slacker with an expired library card. Or, I was. (Still have the expired library card. Do you know how embarrassing it is to walk to the counter to re-check out the basement finishing guide for the third time and be told you let your library membership lapse two years ago?)

Then I realized my phone has a Kindle app. Hello, best invention ever, how are you today?

Since June, I've been spending all my lunch money on books again. 

Reality-Based Leadership was a work read. Priceless got me through some very bumpy plane rides. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl helped some long car rides fly by. Bossypants was over and out before I knew it. The Help was way better than I expected it to be. I'm just a day into The Paris Wife, but whoa nelly, it's a good one.

I've been keeping a little list of what to read next based on reviews from NPR and pals' recommendations, but I want to know what you guys are reading? Anything that fits my staunch list of requirements?

Also, this was a really long way of saying, "No, blog, I haven't done any DIY projects lately. But I'm trying. Do you know how hard it is to find time to paint an old mirror when you just want to figure out why Miss Celia lounges around the house all day and never leaves? Even though you kinda suspected why since the beginning? It's rough, man."