Hard to Read

As readers there are some books we instantly fall in love with, some we fall out of love with, some are slow at the beginning, some fades into nothing, some we power through, and others we give up on. 

There are also those books that are just hard to read, be that because of the language, the story building, our own interest, or something completely different. 

I’ve read books that are 500+ pages in no time at all, and then there are books that I use weeks on even though they’re just a couple of hundred pages. 

But lately, I’ve been reading some books that really take their toll on me. 

For those of you who’s been around for a while, you know that I love historical fiction and non-fiction based on World War II. I usually get through at least 2-3 every year, but for the last 6 months or so I’ve read a lot more of it. And even though I find the stories super interesting and I still enjoy diving into them, the stories of the Holocaust are so horrific and (often) graphic that it completely drains me. Some days I get completely engulfed in the story and can’t put the book down, other days I just need to read something completely different to have a little break. 

Why I need a break? Because reading about the cruelty and hardship of the Second World War tends to send my mind spiraling into a pretty dark place where I wouldn’t like to be stuck. 

It’s hard to place oneself in the minds of those who suffered, and in the minds of the people who were the cause of the suffering.

I think my interest when it comes to reading historical fiction and non-fiction about the war is the same as why I find True Crime so interesting. It’s something about trying to understand how people can get to a place and a mindset where they are overtaken by evil. A way of trying to understand how a mind like that works. 

Maybe it’s macabre, or just human curiosity, I’m not even sure. But the truth is that I’ve had to take breaks more often lately to read lighter fiction like children’s books or comics, just to get the darkness at a distance for a little while. 

That being said, I think that it’s extremely important that we read the stories that are hard to swallow. We learn from the echos of our history.

And even though some of the stories are extremely hard to read, they are amazing reads and I can’t wait to share some of them with you soon.

I Was Thinking About Hotels

I love staying in hotels!

Some people give me the weirdest look whenever utter this statement and I can understand that. If the person do a whole lot of traveling for work and sleeps more in strange places than at home, then of course it’s not going to be the most exciting of experiences. You’ll grow tired of going from place to place when the only place you might actually want to be is at home between your own sheets.

I on the other hand, don’t get to enjoy hotels as often as the traveling worker, so whenever I do get the chance it really is a fascinating experience. There’s just something so incredibly inspiring in staying somewhere new and different. And especially if the room/hotel has a lot of personality and history. And one of the things I enjoy the most is trying to get a feel of what kind of people that lives there besides me. Their stories, their lives and their next direction of choice as they leave the hotel.

At this very moment I’m sitting in my hotel bed in Gothenburg (away on a little family vacation) and the thoughts are rushing to all the stories and lives that this room (and all the others) are keeping as a secret from everyone else.

I’m sure there’s a whole lot of stuff that I don’t want to know about, but then again there are probably a whole lot of interesting history in every single place that I’ve ever stayed. Stories never told of life, love and loss. Of vacations, work and escape routes.

What if these walls could talk? 

For one thing they might be able to tell me why most of the staff in the restaurant had no sense of good customer service, but that’s not really what I want to hear. I want to know about the people that has stayed here, the ideas that came to life and the relationships that formed or ended. The turning points in people’s lives that suddenly appeared in a strange place away from home.

If the walls would talk to someone in the future, my stay here probably would not make the list of the most interesting tales. It would be the story of a ginger girl who sat in bed and wondered. She wondered about the past, the present and the future. And when the wonder factory got too full of wondering she had to let it out before the factory exploded. So she did what she had to do.

She wrote!