Back when I only had one friend in Calgary, and a lovely one at that, we used to go to popular, fun bars together in the hopes of finding our new best friends. Unfortunately, this didn’t work – but we did have some great conversation while at those bars.

Mostly, we talked about books. We are both insatiable readers, and can be a bit snobby about the books we fall in love with. Really, during those conversations we bonded over our mutual hatred for Twilight. In searching for a way to describe to each other just how much we hate Twilight, one of us blurted out something along the lines of “it’s like the Sirens of retail stores” and out of that comment a new hobby was born. We spent a lot of time discussing our favourite books and comparing them to retail stores.

Obviously we’ve already agreed that Twilight = Sirens (or Stitches) and we figured that out using the amount of class we deem the novel to have. Twilight is a terribly written, overly popular, easy book to read and we view Sirens in a similar way. The clothes are easy to wear because they are so inexpensive and trendy, but they are not well made and will fall apart quickly.

Clearly this is a very subjective way to classify a novel, but I’m quite biased and, as I mentioned earlier, snobby when it comes to novels so really, I’m okay with that.  Another favourite novel is Time Traveler’s Wife, which we have decided is comparable to Banana Republic. Classy, well made/written, and quite popular.

What is your favourite book, and which retail store would you compare it to in terms of this classification idea?

P.S. To all of you Twilighters- I apologize.

A couple of Fridays ago, I had a nap after work. It was a long, glorious nap with the sun shining on me and was a great way to pass a lonely Friday night while Tim was working late. I love naps, but they mean mainly one thing for me – I can’t sleep at night. A two hour nap will set back my bedtime by about four hours!

So, when I headed to bed I brought along with me one of my favourite books – Summer Sisters (Judy Blume). I intended to start to read the book, hang out with Tim when he got home from work (around 11:30pm) and read the book until I could fall asleep somewhere between 2:00am-3:00am. Well, the book reading part happened, but the hanging out with Tim? And the going to bed somewhere between 2:00am-3:00am? Nadda. This was because I couldn’t put the book down. I read, and I read and I read. And 3:00am came around, and then 5:00am, and soon the sun was rising and I was still curled comfortably up in bed reading and then it was 6:30am and I put the book down and realized I had read the whole thing.

And then I finally when to sleep, with the sun peaking in my windows and a cute boy’s heat radiating from his body onto mine, and I literally cuddled with this amazing book I had just read and I went to sleep, happy to have spent the entire evening with three of my favourite things – Tim, a good book and me.

To me, reading a book isn’t just about reading a book. It is feeling the characters emotions, laughing out loud, crying openly, learning something new about myself. I can read the same books over and over (and I often do), because I find that each time I read them, I am in a different place in my life and identify with a different part of the book. Be it a single sentence, or maybe an entire half of the book, but each time a different part speaks to me I feel that not only do I understand the book and the author better, but I can understand that part of me that identifies with the book better.