No icecream for you

When I was younger, I read a lot. I still read quite a bit, but nothing like when I was younger and had more time to devote to getting totally lost in a book and forgetting about reality for hours on end. I was the kid dragging out as many books as I could possibly carry from the library, most of them probably a little too old for me at the time... and then probably a little too young for me as I grew older. I think part of my brain stopped about the time I was eleven or so and really needed to find myself totally engrossed in someone else's life. [Which is a nice way of saying that sixth grade was enough to reduce a girl to tears on a daily basis.]

So to say I have a soft spot for those YA books where the heroine is just average and stumbles around trying to figure out that special slice of hell that is high school? Total understatement. There's a certain tone to some books that makes me feel like I'm -however old- again, curled up in my room on a rainy summer afternoon, and it's an awful lot like feeling like I'm home. Which is weird to think about, so I just sort of accept it, I guess. I'd just forgotten that exact feeling because I don't really read books like that anymore. I kind of thought they stopped writing them, to be honest.
[sidetrack] I freely admit the books I read then would probably make most people's brains turn to cheese and mold immediately. People read for different reasons, and I was looking for entertainment and a place in my own head where I could create this world where I might one day have a chance at normalcy, y'know before realizing normal isn't something you can just become, nor does it exist. Annyyyyyway. Still, sometime around my thirteenth birthday, I kind of noticed that all the books I used to read were being swept away and being replaced by nothing of general interest, or really crappy books in whatever series I used to like. It's entirely probable that I just grew up enough to realize I was reading crap, but I'm thinking it's also one of those things where books come and go in cycles, and that's about the time when 'my' cycle crashed and burned. [/sidetrack]

I have no idea why I felt the need to ramble on about that, other than I'm reading Smart Boys & Fast Girls - Stephanie Davis and it falls squarely in the like home category. [Nat is a sophomore on the track team, aaaaaaand just as she's starting to win over the overly bitchy team captain and her bitches, she finds out she's failing geometry. Which you just cannot do and stay on a sports team, unless you're in college or in the South, and usually it's not for track... So she gets a tutor, but doesn't want anyone to know because her parents would yank her off the team and everyone else would think she's stupid. Naturally she gets busted with the tutor and lies and says he's her boyfriend and wacky hijinks ensue, only not as much as you'd think. Woo.]

Unrelated, I think I'm coming down with something. My stomache hurts and has for the last couple of days. :/