The Horsewoman by James Patterson and Mike Lupica. My parents know I love horses and like thrillers, so this seemed a perfect fit, right? Wrong! The writing was just so damn awful, reading it was painful. And thrilling it most certainly was not. I found myself utterly baffled that it ever found its way into being actually published.
Two main ones:
War and Peace: tried to read it during the height of the pandemic, couldn’t concentrate, and now I can’t seem to work up the energy to keep at it much
Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon: I’ve been “reading” it for a solid 6 months now and it just keeps getting put aside in favor of other books. I can’t even articulate why, it just keeps failing to be the book I want to read at the moment
Two main ones:
War and Peace: tried to read it during the height of the pandemic, couldn’t concentrate, and now I can’t seem to work up the energy to keep at it much
Boy’s Life by Robert McCammon: I’ve been “reading” it for a solid 6 months now and it just keeps getting put aside in favor of other books. I can’t even articulate why, it just keeps failing to be the book I want to read at the moment
This book is high in my TBR list. I keep procrastinating, though, because I just know it is going to be incredibly upsetting. I feel so enraged and helpless when reading things like this. I have to pace myself or else I’m going to drive myself insane.
This book is high in my TBR list. I keep procrastinating, though, because I just know it is going to be incredibly upsetting. I feel so enraged and helpless when reading things like this. I have to pace myself or else I’m going to drive myself insane.
I think The Secret Garden was the first classic novel to really capture my attention as a child. It was utterly magical, and I too read it whenever I was sick or sad or just needed a touch of quiet magic in my life.
I think The Secret Garden was the first classic novel to really capture my attention as a child. It was utterly magical, and I too read it whenever I was sick or sad or just needed a touch of quiet magic in my life.
As a kid, Harry Potter, The Secret Garden, and The Enchanted Forest Chronicles were my go-to comfort reads. I read them over and over again, just so that I could escape into their worlds.
As a kid, Harry Potter, The Secret Garden, and The Enchanted Forest Chronicles were my go-to comfort reads. I read them over and over again, just so that I could escape into their worlds.
As a kid, I was obsessed with just about any book with animals in it (including non-fiction reference books). Especially horses and wolves, but really anything, including fantasy animals (I especially loved dragons and unicorns). My cousin once lent me her copy of Into the Land of the Unicorns and I read it 21 times. It was so bedraggled by the time I was ready to return it, I ended up buying a fresh copy for my cousin and keeping the ratty one myself.
Thankfully, I started expanding my horizons a lot more in middle school. But animal books still factor heavily in my reading habits.
It’s such a heartbreaking and enraging read, and terrifying how easy it was for him to get away with something so heinous for so long, right under everyone’s noses. I really hope that she is doing well now, and that writing her memoirs has helped her process it all.
Seriously, I almost feel like they are police propaganda sometimes. They want us all to believe that it is a-okay to go full vengeful street gang when a cop is hurt, or to ignore all procedure and evidence and just go with your gut (aka lean into your personal prejudices), or cover up each other’s crimes because cop-to-cop loyalty is the ultimate virtue. It genuinely pisses me off sometimes (I want to yell at the screen “you are not the good guys here!”)
It took me a week to read the unabridged Les Miserables. I got it for Christmas one year and had completely devoured it before New Year’s Day.
I feel you on the massive reading slump. Reading was historically my primary coping mechanism that got me through some really hard times, so I was completely blindsided by not being able to utilize that during the pandemic. It was like my brain had been hijacked by a completely different person. I started doing amigurumi and learning birdsongs to try to stay sane.
I was reading The Domesday Book so yes, weird and unsettling.
That was such a comfort read for me when I was struggling with depression in college. It really is delightful.
For me, it was the Expanse series. I was really struggling, and I found that my primary form of self soothing (reading books) had become suddenly impossible. I was too restless and agitated, I couldn’t focus, I could barely manage listening to an audiobook while working with my hands, but then I would get overwhelmed by the noise and have to turn it off and start fretting again. Yet I was desperate to get my brain to stop spinning. Then, one day I picked up Leviathan Wakes and something just clicked in my brain. I’m not really into SciFi, but this one caught my attention and I became immersed in it in a way that I hadn’t managed for quite a while. I ended up devouring the series, so grateful to have finally found something that pulled me out of everything that was going on.
I feel like a few things will really draw me in with a book and make it stand out, but I feel like one of the big intangibles that really matters is having a certain almost musical rhythm and flow to how it is written. And I don’t mean flowery language (hell, Dr Seuss manages excellent flow through silly, simple rhymes, and I was argue that this is a big reason why they have remained so popular). I mean that there is something about how it is written (the words, the transitions, the structure) that moves according to such a natural rhythm that it draws you into the story and out of yourself. Then, once you’ve been lulled into forgetting that you are reading at all, the story itself is free to impact you as if everything was actually really happening to you. Of course, now that I’m trying to think about it, I’m having a hard time coming up with a really good example of this. But yeah, if I can get caught up in the flow of the words and story, I’m going to get much more immersed and the book will end up sticking with me more.