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I unfortunately have a lot of memories of being sick as a child. If there was a cold or flu I caught it. As much as I hate being sick there were comforts there as well. My mother would make soup. I'd eat plain toast and drink ginger ale while watching cartoons. Mostly though, I remember sick days as being an opportunity to stay in bed, or at least on the couch under a pile of blankets, and read. Yep, sick days were made immeasurably better by the addition of book.
I've slowly been adding books to my collection that disappeared over the years, books that I used to read when I wasn't feeling well. I'm not sure how they ever managed to leave my collection. One of my favourite series to read was Gordon Korman's MacDonald Hall series. There's no way that you could feel too bad when Bruno and Boots were making mischief. They would make me smile and laugh, but not too much but it was difficult since as Noha at Meet My Shadow says, the series is "bloody genius". Sometimes I needed something a bit more mellow than the antics at MacDonald Hall, or more correctly, I had to stop laughing and acting like I was enjoying myself quite so much. Now I really don't care whether someone hears me laughing when I'm sick or not. I figure if I can manage to laugh that's a good thing because it means I haven't completely lost my voice.
I tend to turn a lot to favourite childhood books when I'm sick. In addition to Bruno and Boots I also tend to read Mildred Lawrence's Peachtree Island. It's an endearing story of an orphaned girl who goes to stay with her uncle on his peach farm. She tries to every "as good as a boy" so that he'll keep her. I dont' know what happened to my original copy of it but I sure was happy when I tracked down a copy of it on eBay earlier this year. If I'm not too sick I love to revist L.M. Montgomery's works, particularly The Story Girl. This is what Elizabeth Kathryn Miller has to say about it:
One could read the book for the little stories alone. But there is a larger story throughout, one of the personal growth of all the children. They learn about the importance of forgiveness, the silliness of grudges, the lost days given to fear.
Sometimes I wish I still had the old Sweet Valley High and Baby-Sitters Club books that long ago found another home. It feels like they'd be good books to read when I'm sick. Although I have been reading The Baby-Sitters Club Revisited Blog for awhile now and I think that perhaps they are not books that quite stand the same test of time.
I suppose the part of the reason these books call to me when I'm sick is because they remind me when I was a little girl. My mother is not going to come tuck me in with a cold glass of ginger ale and a damp cloth for my forehead. In reading these books though, I'm nurturing that same part of myself. And I won't lie, it makes the sneezing and coughing more tolerable.
Contributing Editor Sassymonkey is nursing a cold and trying hard not to lose her voice. She blogs at Sassymonkey and Sassymonkey Reads.
