On Twitter, where I admittedly spend more time than is probably recommended, the issue of representative vs. aspirational writing comes up often, if not necessarily using these exact terms.
To clarify, I’d always heard that some people do this.
However, it wasn’t until I read the comments on a recent Twitter post about content/trigger warnings vs. spoilers in books and whether they represent the same thing that I came to realize just how many people do this, and also some of the reasons why.
For 2021, I’ve once again signed up for the Goodreads reading challenge.
Even less often do I give one-star.
It surely goes without saying that I love writing five-star reviews best of all.
This is obviously true when a gripping story threatens to keep you up well past your bedtime. And all the more so in the midst of a book that is decidedly opposite to that.
Twelve books a year doesn’t trouble me anymore, but it did at the time. I found myself floundering beneath the burden of various competing obligations, some mandatory, some discretionary, and that reading, my oldest pastime, had fallen far by the wayside.
“If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.”
He’s right in more ways than one. The tools that reading has to offer are numerous.
I started 2018 off strong, with my previous Recent Reads post from January to March including four completed books.
(Well technically, three books and one novella, but one of those books was a reference for the next historical fiction novel I plan to write. Reading that required highlighting and note-taking that slowed me down considerably, and perhaps balances out the novella’s shorter length.)
