Five Fandom Friday: 5 Favorite Places to Read

Five Fandom Friday is a weekly meme hosted by The Nerdy Girlie and Super Space Chick. This week's topic was originally supposed to be favorite podcasts, but I don't do podcasts so I thought I'd revisit a prompt I missed: 5 favorite places to read!

Image courtesy Quicksandala

1. Public transportation

This is where I do a lot of my reading, especially with my Kindle app. I can travel up to an hour or so for work sometimes, which adds up to a lot of built-in reading time! Fortunately I don't really suffer from motion sickness when reading in moving vehicles. (Watching people play FPS games is another matter entirely, however.)

Image courtesy mconnors

2. In bed

Our couch isn't really the coziest. Sometimes I sit and read next to JV while he's playing a game, but it's not super comfortable and I usually end up distracted by the game anyway. So if I want to read at home, I usually read in bed. This is best paired with cuddle time: everything I love, together at last!

3. In bed (again)

Sometimes I have a tough time falling asleep. Like anyone else, I have a few brain weasels that can keep me up at night if I don't manage them well. The best way to deal with them at bedtime is to have JV read to me. Even if I"m not really interested in what he's reading, following the sound of his voice is calming enough for me to fall asleep. Sometimes this backfires and I'll become really interested in what he's reading. This most recently happened when he went digging through his collection of The Brothers Grimm and found some weird, weird stuff. We all love Cinderella and Snow White, after all, but what about The Bird, The Mouse, and the Sausage? But usually he chooses H. P. Lovecraft, one of his favorites but not mine, so he gets to read a story he loves and I get to fall asleep easily. 

Sometimes we just sit in bed together and he'll read to me, as in read a story I actually pay attention to. Right now we're working on Terry Pratchett's Truckers. I guess it's kind of weird to dodge this week's prompt about podcasts because I don't like them, but then spend so much time talking about how I like having my boyfriend read to me, but there it is! I guess I just don't like most people's voices all that much. But JV has the loveliest voice. ;)

4. On the farm

JV's parents have a small farm outside Uppsala, where they raise sheep and chickens. The Internet connection is always dodgy, so it's a great place to unwind and finish up all the reading you've been meaning to do. It's also really nice to be out in the country and away from our party-happy neighbors.

Image courtesy Arild Vågen

5. In libraries

First of all, I'd like to take a moment and show off. THIS IS ONE OF MY LIBRARIES! Or one of Stockholm's libraries, more precisely. I think the exterior of this particular branch (Stadsbiblioteket) is a butt ugly orange wedding cake, but the interior of the rotunda is just the most amazing thing. Maybe I should do a libraries of Stockholm series? Would that be interesting?

Anyway, back to the meme. There is something incredibly calming about the quiet of a library, whether it's hundreds of years old or brand new. The one pictured here is closing in on 90 or 100, if I remember my Swedish architecture course correctly. I think a cloister or a monastery would have that same respect for stillness. Whenever I read in a library, it's like I'm suspended in a bubble, far away from the stress of the real world. 

Where do you like to read?