I do this in my dual roles of both writer and reader, the former to help my fellow writers try to generate book sales, and the latter because I just enjoy sharing my opinions about what I’m reading.
I do this because I’m a writer with aspirations of future publication and strong book sales.
I’m aware of how crucial reviews are to authors, both in helping produce those strong sales and in enabling one to (traditionally) publish subsequent books.
Books I’ve stolen borrowed from others (and haven’t even read yet)
I fully acknowledge the hypocrisy, and perhaps even level of selfishness, that applies to this policy of mine.
I’m not even a particularly good borrower of other people’s books. Or rather, good returner of them, I should say.
Of course, there is factual truth to this statement: I literally learned and continued to read stories before I started writing them (although the timing for both is close; I clearly recall writing my first “novel” in grade two).
Even now as an adult, my almost-daily reading occurs earlier in the day (dinner time) than does my almost-daily writing (after dinner, the last thing before I go to sleep).
Ever since my very first Amazon book purchase on October 25, 2002, I’ve never stopped debating myself on the value of customer book reviews. (If you ever want to enjoy a nostalgia-filled blast through the past, go through your Amazon purchase history order by order, year by year, back to the very beginning.)
On the one hand, professional reviewers aren’t always giving in-depth reviews of the books I read or want to read. As well, there are way more customer reviewers out there; the law of averages alone suggests I’m more likely to share tastes with an amateur than a pro, many of whom fall into more similar social demographics to each other than to me.
There are people out there who read like fifty books a year.This post is not for them.
(Indeed, I wish one of them would write their own post to teach me to read more.)
Reading is my oldest pastime, yet the older I get, the less time I seem to have for it.
I don’t ever want to stop reading books. But life is busy and full of countless distractions, not the least of which include writing, socializing, finally watching Homeland on Netflix (seriously, have you seen that show?!), and of course working – by far the biggest occupier of my time.
Last year for New Year’s, I resolved to read 12 books for the year. A book a month-ish, as I took to calling it given the overlap of some calendar months that occurred.
Admittedly, having just celebrated my 35th birthday, it’s hardly a revelation that I’m the genre’s target audience.
However, my conclusion came even less recently than that; it happened about a month ago when I finished my sixth YA dystopian title this year after Suzanne Collins’s Mockingjay, Beth Revis’s Across the Universe trilogy, and Samantha Shannon’s The Bone Season:
The uber-popular Divergent, by Veronica Roth (soon to be a movie in 2014).
In this book, all 16-year-olds – the main character, Tris, included – undergo often violent and competitive initiations in order to be inducted into one of four societal factions that go on the govern the rest of their lives (full plot summary here).
I’m no exception in this regard. To wit, I’ve been meaning to read the fantasy novel In the Eye of Heaven since its publication in 2007. Back then, fantasy was my genre of choice, and this book was blurbed by my favourite fantasy author, Jacqueline Carey.
As well, the book’s author – David Keck – is a fellow Canadian and was a debut author in the genre in which I’d hoped to someday be published.
I finally read this book this past May. It’s success in summiting my eight-years-long TBR pile has a lot to do with its subject matter, as well as my assertion in a previous post that sometimes research for one’s own novel is conducted via fictional sources.
Cover and spine of my worse-for-wear copy of The Pillars of the Earth. Over the course of reading, it eventually became a contest to see which would occur first: me reaching the end or the back cover falling off. The cover won.
Not all of them have been nonfiction.
I suspect that conducting research via fiction is something numerous writers do, and not just those writing historicals.
I’m sure almost every writer has consciously studied existing novels to see how others have handled any number of elements of writing craft, from as broad as character development to as concrete as the number of pages per chapter.
So it was, therefore, that I came to Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth. Reading this book fell under the purview of “research” for three reasons:
Cue delusion.
Although, it could happen. Anything could happen.
I digress.
(A/N: Mild spoilers for Beth Revis’s Across the Universe series)
Here’s a scenario for you:Imagine you had the opportunity to help colonize a new planet located hundreds of light-years away. This would involve saying goodbye forever to everyone and everything you know and love on Earth, being cryogenically frozen for centuries, and shipped off into the stars.
Would you go?*
This question is brought to you by a dystopian young adult sci-fi series dealing with this very subject: Beth Revis’s Across the Universe trilogy. This trilogy includes Across the Universe, A Million Suns, and the final book of the series – Shades of Earth – which I read back in February.
A Frame Around Infinity 