Book Recommendations

After nearly fourteen years of marriage I can't even begin to count the number of books I have tried to recommend to my husband. I love recommending books to people. And I feel like I know the guy fairly well so the books I pick out are ones he is sure to like. Except he hates when I recommend books to him. He will go out of his way to read a book I hate, but if I tell him there is a book he should read, it is almost certain he won't touch that title. I find this extremely frustrating, but have decided to ignore it. My husband is not a reader like me. He reads magazines and reads a lot of different things on-line, but his reading is confined to a short span of time before he goes to sleep. A few years ago I started a book journal for him where I keep track of the titles he reads. He does like looking back over that, but his normal yearly reading total is right around 12 books a year.

I have been giving him a hard time lately because this year he may be off to his slowest start ever. So far he has read five books in 2012. In his defense, the one book he read was very long and took quite a while to get through. He also started helping at high school wrestling practice, so was booked up for wrestling season, too. All of his reading then consisted of wrestling, wrestling, and more wrestling.

Right before vacation our neighbor handed him Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. He didn't touch it on vacation, but started reading it a few nights ago. Tonight he has been glued to the couch and just minutes ago proclaimed that he wouldn't sleep until he was through reading. It seems he rather likes this book. Which is great. But, what about the fact that I recommended this one to him right after I read it? I decided not to even bring that up when he was given this book in fear that he would immediately decide not to like this book. I'll wait til he is done to share that. And maybe someday- another decade and a half into our marriage- he will trust that I can recommend books to him that he will enjoy.