Style in Print: Written Inspiration

I'm a reader. I'm an avid reader.

My mommy was an English teacher, so maybe that's why we grew up surrounded - literally - by books. Like so many others, books are my escape, my haven, and, not to sound all trite, but my soul. The written word gives me the chance to forget my daily life, to raise it up, or to release it. I've been known to hide out with a book, avoiding whatever's on the other side of the door. I've been known to laugh hysterically, out loud, then try to muffle it while other coffee shop patrons glace askew.

I'm rarely without a book. In my purse, on my nightstand, in our bathroom, they stand stacked. In times of short attention span, I "resort" to magazines. I read anything from Star to Cook's Illustrated to Town and Country to Smithsonian.

I cried when H and I were trying desperately to make room for The Bean's arrival, packing up the books we thought we wouldn't need so they could go in boxes in the basement.

Though I was carrying on, stiff (but quivering) upper lip and all - willing to put them aside for our new baby (who turns out to love books as much as I do) - H made me - over my I-want-to-be-a-grownup-about-this protests - stop and pull them out of the box so they could stay upstairs with me.

I'll read just about anything, though I tend very strongly towards the fiction variety. I'll make an exception for the exceptional, like Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts, Voices and Silences, James Earl Jones' memoir, or my beloved copy of a massive Katherine Hepburn (my ultimate style heroine, to be deliciously frank) biography I picked up on my first trip to Cambridge, England. (And yes, there's a juicy thrill I get when I read the lines that mention my ancestor-y relative and famously dramatic suffragette, Emmeline Pankhurst, was a bit player in Kate H's life.)

As I tweeted to Alison this morning that I loved her pirate-y ensemble (oddly, it looks like that tweet never went through - pooh), and recommended she get her E a book The Bean adored this summer (Jane Yolen's The Ballad of the Pirate Queens), I realized I needed to add a board to my obsessive pinning: Written Inspiration. Since reading Anne of Green Gables and Macbeth in my middle school years, my wardrobe choices have been incredibly influenced by the tales I read.

Perhaps it's time I return to that inspiration.

Go see what pages inspire me on my new Pinterest board, Written Inspiration. (You are on Pinterest, aren't you?) It's a work in progress, of course, and promises to be a walk down a literature memory lane.