Before there was binge TV watching, there was binge reading. Since I have started a new binge set, I’ve been thinking about some binge reading from my past. The first one I recall are the Louisa Mae Alcott books – Little Women, Little Men, Jo’s Boys – and others not quite so well known. In recent years, I have even found a copy of The Lost Stories of Louisa Mae Alcott, supposedly those she was embarrassed about writing in Little Women.
As a young military wife, I was introduced to Agatha Christie by the wife of Allen’s boss who said she “never read anything that counted.” I would pass that binge on to my father who passed it on to my youngest sister. I have partial collections of both of these that I return to on occasion.
Our youngest son Mark did his own binge reading during the summer between second and third grade as he checked out every copy of the Hardy boys from the post library over the summer and finished his list in the school library in the fall. I frequently had parents of my students bewail the lack of variety in their children’s reading choices. I used Mark’s binge as an example to point out that eventually one runs out of Hardy boys books and has to turn elsewhere. My theory is that one needs to be grateful that your children enjoy reading. Entice them with some they may love, but let them pick.
I have recently started a new binge. I just returned the eleventh and twelfth Louise Penny mysteries featuring Armand Gamache to my local library and checked out the thirteenth and fourteenth. The twelfth, A Great Reckoning, was the best yet – which I find pretty amazing. You would think they would become predictable, but I haven’t been sure whodunnit by the time I got to the end yet. Returning to the same location and characters, even though they live in Canada, makes me feel like I am in familiar territory among friends. I recommend this binge and also recommend reading them in order, although each book is a standalone and makes sense by itself.
Now I’m wondering, not that I need any additions to my to-be-read stack, if my readers might have a binge to recommend.