Ah, the joys of reading. Anything, everything, anywhere, anytime, from the sides of cereal boxes to fiction and non-fiction. Nowadays, I spend a lot of time finding interesting things on the web to read. I get hooked into various authors and voraciously read everything they've written. I do a lot of light reading -- latest is Tim Dorsey's slightly sick but hilarious and satirical series about criminals and life in Florida, and all of Dan Brown's stuff (The DaVinci Code).
But, the most fun of all is Barnes and Noble. We go at least twice a month and spend an entire evening. We wander around and pick up all the how-to books (the latest is Florida native landscaping), and anything else that attracts our fancy, carry them all to a table in the Starbucks cafe in the middle of the store, leaf through them, take notes (on native plants and such), note down interesting websites referenced in magazines, then, near closing time, leave them all on the table for the clerks to put away, and leave, maybe buying one book, maybe not.
It's a tradition at B&N that they encourage. No more clerks saying, "Hey, this isn't a library, if you want to read that, buy it!" Besides, we never go there that we don't see two or three of our friends doing the same thing. It's almost like the old general store and the cracker barrel conversations.
But, the key is reading. Manuals (I'm one who reads them first), how-to's, catalogs, magazines, newspapers, news sites, fiction, non-fiction (especially history), and my favorite, historical fiction, in which the events are accurate but the conversations are imagined. Law books, the Bible, biographies -- in fact, everything but poetry -- I never got my head into that.
