Because Of What Haunts Me.

It's funny that as much as I love to read, once I was assigned to pleasure read for my Reading Process class, I found that I really didn't want to. I think it has something to do with the fact that now I was worried about what consisted of "pleasure reading". I like to reread books and that's why I own books instead of just checking them out from the library, but would I be counted down for rereading a book that I had already read twenty times? I didn't know, and it became very stressing to me. For days I would wander around my house (because I'm slightly unorganized and my books are EVERYWHERE [this is not even a joke, there is right now a book laying on the ground in my living room that has been there for months, for no reason]) looking for a book to read, and then wondering if I was supposed to stay with my current book or whether I was allowed to stop reading that one periodically to start another, more appealing, book. I just didn't know.
I started reading Pathfinder, but forty pages into it two people had already died (oops, spoiler alert) and I decided that maybe I should reserve this book for a time when I would have a few days off in a row so that I could completely focus my attention on it, because books that have a lot of death in them generally take a lot out of me mentally and emotionally and it affects the rest of my day, so I didn't want to continue reading and then take that with me for the rest of the day while at work, because work is also very taxing mentally and emotionally and I'm not stable enough to do both together. Don't judge. Also, sorry for the run-on sentence
So then I started reading The Book Whisperer, which was a class assignment in my Reading Process class and I found myself wanting to read past the assigned chapters, but I stopped myself because I couldn't decide if that was pleasure reading or just reading ahead in class. In general, I was starting to become agitated with this assigned pleasure reading, because suddenly nothing about it was pleasurable.
Today I finally picked The Princess Bride back up and forced myself to continue with my "pleasure reading". It was a little hard to concentrate at first but I stuck it out and found myself devouring the pages of the book.

There is a part where Princess Buttercup has a nightmare that she actually marries Prince Humperdinck and she's walking among the commoners when an old lady calls her out for choosing being Queen over having real love and she panics and that's when she wakes up and realizes that she was only dreaming. The thing about it is though, the reader isn't aware that she's dreaming and there for a minute you think, "The hell?! She marries him?!" (unless you've seen the movie and then you think, "WTF? THIS IS WHY I HATE IT WHEN THEY MAKE MOVIES FROM BOOKS") and then you find out that she's just dreaming and all is okay with the world. Except that it's not all okay with William Goldman and it's not all okay with ME.
William Goldman is all agitated about something and he rants about life not being fair and he kind of segues onto this rant about life and when he was a child and his neighbor, and you become sort of lost with what he's really talking about. The part of this rant that stuck out to me was in the very beginning, when he says that life isn't fair and that sometimes good people die, even in books when you're expecting happy endings.

This is such a huge thing for me, because I really dislike books/movies that don't have happy endings, or where something really awful happens (here's looking at you, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry), and I tend to shy away from those books as often as possible. Or at least I used to. There were years of my life where I refused to watch sad movies, or movies where good people die, or movies where good people die and then good people want revenge for the death of the other good people and then they go to JAIL (*cough* Law Abiding Citizen *cough*), and it started after I had to attend the funeral of my grandma;, she was the first person that I actually knew who would die - and she would be the first of many in the next few years. I was fragile and I couldn't handle books that dealt with the issues that I was really dealing with in real life. Books were my haven, my escape from real life, and I couldn't deal with how they suddenly spoke directly to the events of my life. What crap is that, books?! You are supposed to be the thing that I escape TO.

It's only been the past year or so that I've started reading novels that contain more..., death. I understand that life isn't fair, and that if all of the books that I read had happy endings then I would start to really hate my own reality. Obviously it still affects me and sometimes when I pick up a book and two people die within the first forty pages I have to put it back down, and save it for a day when I know that I can lay in bed and cry it out.

But really, TWO PEOPLE IN FORTY PAGES? It was like reading Game of Thrones all over again.