...is my reading 'mojo' back.
Sometimes it takes a blog post from someone else to highlight a problem, and my friend Sam over at Books, Time and Silence has really hit the nail on the head. Leaving book retail has really changed my reading habit.
I've been keeping a reading diary for nearly 10 years - incidentally the only diary I've managed to keep - and on average I've tended to read about 350-400 books a year. Many of them were children's books (although I never counted picture books), lots of them were books I'd re-read but many of them were new books for that year. I am blessed with the ability to read fast (this can be a curse on journeys and holidays when my luggage is always twice as heavy due to the sheer quantity of reading matter) but even with that quantity of books I do retain the plots. Ask my husband he has tested me!
However this year I left the world of book retail, okay I now work in a library, but like Sam I no longer see the book on its journey from publisher's catalogue to customer's hand. I am now a browser not a hunter. This year I've read a scant 250 and many of them were comforting rereads at times when life has been more stressful. I know that this still seems an awful lot of books to have read, but for me it is a significant drop and I am having to remind myself frequently of the rules and I am trying not to feel guilty about this. It isn't even as if I have Sam's reason that the books I have read have been 'harder' than usual and have slowed me down.
Oh well my Christmas list was full of book requests and we have recently treated ourselves to this which I am rapidly filling with books so hopefully in 2010 I will rediscover my reading mojo and a whole heap of new authors!
And yes I will be jumping on the blog bandwagon and be posting my books of the year soon!
Great post, Sarah, it is good to know I'm not the only one suffering from a lack of mojo!
ReplyDeleteAnd thank you for introducing me to Daniel Penac's 'Rights of the Reader'. Love 'em.