Favorite Guilty Pleasure

I shared this picture a few days early, when I picked it off my bookshelf. There are some books you just CRAVE to read over and over, and this is mine.

 

I started reading The Thorn Birds years ago, before I was really old enough to understand everything that was going on. In fact, I remember having to ask my mom to explain some of the more…ahem…romantic parts. I had just pulled it off the shelf because it was thick and ORANGE, so it had probably caught my young eyes as something intriguing.

I can’t tell you what draws me back to this over and over, other than it is so familiar and delicious to me, it is like a big piece of chocolate cake. I know that I rescued this copy from one of my mom’s garage sale piles–when I found she was getting rid of it, I quickly snagged it up, and now it’s mine. The pages are falling out of it–the binding is in utter shreds because I have read it so many times. Every time I read it I tell myself just to go buy a new copy, but somehow, this one goes back on the shelf, and that new copy never appears. And next time I’m ready, the musty, yellow pages welcome me home again.

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