What I'm reading:
- O'REILLY'S BRIDE by Trish Wylie
What's on the CD player:
- UNWRITTEN by Natasha Bedingfield
What I watched last night with the family:
- MAD LOVE with Peter Lorre and Colin Clive
The "What I'm reading," above, will tell you how I resolved the quandary in my last post ... I decided to stick with one book at a time. Yep, I'm a monogamous reader at heart. I'm so involved in Trish's story I've had no desire to wander elsewhere. Good to know about myself.
But it got me thinking about my other unwritten rules for reading, and I wonder how many people out there share them. Or not.
Do you:
- Read the last page to see how it ends?
Heresy!! The only way I'd peek at the ending of a book would be if I absolutely hated it and just wanted to see how the writer got him/herself out of the mess. Or if it was a book I didn't intend to read for at least 10 years. I hate spoilers!
- Skip slow-moving scenes or descriptions?
(clutching my throat and falling to the floor) Ack! Never! I might miss something! Plus, how can you say you've read the book if you haven't read the whole book?
I've heard of people skipping lovemaking scenes, but I can't imagine why, unless you didn't know you were reading That Kind of a Book. (I write "sweet," but I read "steamy" as well.)
- Dog-ear pages?
This I have been known to do, if it's a paperback and I want to refer back to the scene for Writerly Purposes. At that point, my reading book also doubles as a "text" book, and different rules apply.
Otherwise, I love all those nice promotional bookmarks.
Dog-ear a hardcover? Never.
Do you have any of your own reading "rules," or secret naughty reading habits? And do I sound totally obsessive-compulsive by now?
3 comments:
I'm not sure if this can be considered a rule, but I find it difficult to stop reading a bad book. Maybe it's guilt, or hope that the author will manage to turn it around and pull a decent story out of the train wreck on the pages. Maybe it's morbid facination with said train wreck. Whatever it is, I can think of only one novel I've ever stopped reading in the middle. It was a looong time ago and I honestly can't recall the title, just the recollection of "Man, this so totally sucks."
That's a hard one for me, too. Sometimes I'll whip through a bad book really fast just to get the sucker out of the way. But this past year, more often, I've let them languish unfinished and picked up something I want to spend my time on.
Oh, and when I finish a bad one, sometimes I allow myself to throw it on the floor. Gently. I have too much respect for the binding to do anything violent!!
Until I spoke to my mother-in-law about books a few months ago, I'd never heard of anybody who read the end before they got started on the story. It hadn't even dawned on me that anybody would.
Mum-in-law also tells me off for dog-earing pages but I like my books to look as though they've been read and enjoyed.
I do sometimes skip bits that drag on too much and if there are too much such bits, I'll put the book down and start another. There are just too many books out there to waste time on those I'm not enjoying :-)
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