Pleasure reads

I love reading.

Inevitably, I forget how much I love it because I'm bogged down in academia, but during my break, I started up again, and I'm not sure I can stop. I've been up past midnight for five consecutive nights reading. Well past midnight, at that.

Tonight I started (and nearly finished) Go Ask Alice. Only 11 or so years after the target age, I'm reading it for the first time, and I find it disturbing.

Sure the drugs, drugged sex and rape, and running away from home multiple times is scary, if you imagine it being someone you know or love.

But by far, the most frightening thing about the whole book is when I read a paragraph of a day in the life of this girl, and I remember those feelings and I shake my head because I wrote the same thing in my diary all those years ago.

How did I end up where I am, when I started, age 14, just like she did? A loving, good, Christian family with adorable and wonderful grandparents nearby, yet always the family misfit, concerned with fitting in at school and impressing boys (though pretending not to care) and then overindulging in feelings for one such boy. The volatile emotions...