on taste, books & time
I read for pleasure, not as a public service.
There are more books in the world than I could read in several lifetimes, and somehow, V. E. Schwab keeps publishing new ones. Rude, honestly.
So in the past 3 years I’ve become particular about what earns a place on my reading list, and even more particular about what gets to stay there.
I’m usually looking for fantasy, science fiction, and horror with atmosphere, complicated characters, emotional damage, and something interesting to say. Give me strange worlds, terrible decisions, unsettling questions, morally questionable people, and stories that linger long after I’ve closed the book.
What I’m not looking for is whatever happens to be trending simply because everyone else is reading it. Popular books can be wonderful and so much fun (yes, I’m looking at you ACOMAF). They can also be three hundred pages counting the pages until the end of the chapter because I can’t wait to be done with it.
taste is personal. time is not unlimited.
A book doesn’t need to be flawless for me to love it. It does, however, need to give me a reason to continue.
Maybe it’s the writing. Maybe it’s the atmosphere. Maybe one fascinating little disaster of a character has convinced me to follow them straight into hell. I’m flexible.
But if reading starts to feel like homework, I’m out.
I don’t believe finishing every book makes someone a better reader. Sometimes a book simply isn’t right for you. Sometimes it isn’t right for you yet. And sometimes it has committed crimes for which there can be no forgiveness.
yes, I DNF books.
I hade DNFing books because it makes me feel like I wasted my money, but I’ve come to understand that DNFing a book isn’t failure. It’s time management.
My reading time is limited, my TBR is embarrasingly long, and no book is entitled to hours of my life simply because I started it. I’ll give a story a fair chance, but I won’t force myself through something I’m not enjoying just to say I finished.
This is where I write about how I choose what to read, what makes a book worth my time, why certain stories work for me, and why others are gently, or not so gently, sent to Literary Purgatory.
Your taste doesn’t have to match mine. That’s what makes talking about books interesting
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I don’t blog about everything I read, but I do review everything I read.
If you are interested in the most complete list of the books I’ve finished and my current reads, visit my Goodreads page, my Story Graph page or my Fable page.