Welcome.

Hi there, my name is Amanda-Jaied and I love to read.

I'm not talking magazines, letters, billboards and cereal packets here...I 'm talking full on books. Nice, papery, musty smelling, spine-cracking, absorbing books.
It doesn't even, really matter what genre, be they Chick-Lit, Horror, True Crime, Thriller, Romance, Autobiography, Memoirs, Classics; i'll have them all.

I love the feeling you get when you first open a book, the smell that hits you, the feel of the paper beneath my fingers, the sound the pages make when you turn them. (death to the Kindle and E-reader IMHO). I love walking in to a store and running my fingers along shelfs-upon-shelfs of undiscovered titles, discovering and re-discovering stories that really mean something to me.

I have been reading books since I was knee high to a grashopper (some will say that wasn't that long ago but ignore them) the point is I can't even remember when I started or what the first book I read was, simply because it was so long ago. As a child I was like little Matilda, piles of books from the library were always strewn across my bed, I made my mum sign up for countless book clubs, so I could get a new book every month. When we went shopping I didn't pout and stamp my feet because they wouldn't buy me sweets, no I wanted more books. I would read everything and anything you put in front of me; from "Biff and Chip" to "So We're Going to Have a Baby"-a very enlightening read for a 9 year old!!!

My genre of books has steadied itself out a bit now and thankfully, grown up a little bit too. I will still pretty much read anything but I have found a style I'm not a great fan of and that's True War and SAS type stuff, that my boyfriend seems to devour. I don't know why I don't enjoy them but I guess there had to be something, eventually.

The point of this blog is that, I recently discovered that many of my friends don't read. They can't remember what the last book they read was and some even reckon it was "something boring they were forced to read at school". This saddens me and a quick google search of 'why aren't people reading anymore' wields the views of many others that agree with me. I don't know if it's because, in this technology driven world which we live in there is just so many more exciting(?) things to do or if people have just forgotten, how to imagine.

A good book can take you further than any movie, using your own imagination and the words of an amazing (or sometimes even mediocre) writer, you can create worlds, people, situations and emotions that last alot longer than the 120minutes of a standard run time movie. A book can make you laugh, cry, hang your head in despair, get angry, cheer up, whatever feeling you want to feel, pick the right book and you can feel it.

Im going to show you some of my favourite books, over the next few months, i'll review them and I highly suggest you read them, or even just read more in general, it wont hurt to try.

Thanks for Reading
Amanda-jaied