"What's in a Word?" - a book review

If you can tell by looking at my left side bar, I am an avid reader. I have always been. I can remember climbing up into the front yard tree with my book, mini boom box and blanket to curl up in the cradle of branches and read for hours (while listening to the radio). My Mom would take me to the used book store to pickup paperback novels for a quarter ($0.25).

I put reading books on the back burner when I started having kids. Mostly I read lots of magazines. After a few years, I started feeling like I was having attention problems. Anything longer than a column of words was too much. I started to skip around. I moved on to reading the newspaper. At least it was relevant. Then I picked up my first book in forever. Sadly, it was Twilight.

It was like herion to me. I couldn't get enough. I needed more. I needed to read the rest. And when I was done, I felt depressed. It wasn't so much the writing, but the whole story. That first consuming love. I loved it and I was hooked. I spent all of 2009 reading everything I could.

At first, I went to the local bookstore and picked up any books that looked interesting. I joined a website called "goodreads" and added my friend, Rachel, and read through her reviews and added books to my "to read" shelf. Finally, as my then 9 year old daughter became more of a voracious reader, I went down to the local library and got us some library cards. Now I go on the libraries website and put any book I want for myself or my daughter on "hold". When the book comes in I pick it up and thumb through it while my youngest two look through the children's section and pick out books for themselves.

I feel like I'm encouraging my kids to be great readers by always reading myself. I love that at the end of the day, I can find my Mr C and Miss M laying in her bed reading their own books. They like to read together and Mr C's reading has grown by leaps and bounds by reading next to Miss M. Last night, I found Miss R curled up on Miss M's bed reading her own book along side Mr C and Miss M. Miss R can't read yet, but she was loving this alone time and I'm proud of my little readers.

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Now, back to my book review. I found a website called BookSneeze where they send any blogger a free book of their choice to read and review. The only requirement is to write a blog about my review and post my review on a public site like Amazon.

I received "What's in a Word?" by Webb Garrison quite awhile ago. The following is my opinion on the book:

The little things we say in society, even more so when you travel to different regions of the USA have always fascinated me. My great grandma always says, “for crying out loud”. Now my Dad and daughter say this. But when asked, they don’t know why, except that my Nana says it. Where does this word come from? Why do people say it?

That’s when I came across the book, “What’s in a Word?” It’s a book of short entries separated by categories. I found that it was slightly outdated (with the computer genre). I’m sure most of us aren’t very interested in where the word “floppy disk” came from. Many of us don’t even remember what a floppy disk is! I did find the stories fun to read if you jumped around and read random passages. It was interesting to learn the history of common phrases we use.

When I first started to read this book, I tried to read it like a novel - entry after entry in the same category. I found this mind numbing and boring. But for some fun facts and random trivia, grab this book and skip around. Find something that catches your attention and read on. It’s a great book to keep by the couch, bedside or in the bathroom.