Finishing That Special Book

I love reading. I love the feeling of being immersed in a story that takes me away from my day to day life and into another world. I love the excitement of rushing home to pick up where I left off. I know as I read through the pages that the end is nigh, that before long the book will be finished. I know I will have mixed feelings about this, both a sense of completion and a sense of sadness.

I don’t always finish every book I start to read. In fact if I’m really honest I would have to say that I don’t finish most of the books I start. I sometimes begin a book with great enthusiasm and then find it just doesn’t keep my interest, doesn’t live up to the high expectations I have of it. When I don’t look forward to rushing home to read it I have to decide whether to persevere or give up on it. Sometimes persevering is worth it but often it’s not.

I have so many books with bookmarks part way through. Sometimes I revisit the book at another time and find that I can pick up the story and enjoy it. Other times I find it too hard and just give up again. I know then that this book is just not for me. I accept that I’m not going to like every book I pick up. Some just don’t have a writing style that works for me. Some have distractions that I find annoying. Some of the storyline just doesn’t connect with me. I can’t always work out exactly what it is that doesn’t work for me and if I don’t like it I don’t exactly want to waste time analyzing it. There are certainly plenty more books out there to try out.
This love of books and reading developed very early for me. I’m not even sure why but I do remember loving a book shop my mum took me to as a child. I must have been about seven or eight years old and she would leave me there while she did her shopping. I wasn’t a difficult child so it wasn’t like I would have thrown a tantrum and refused to leave. She must have just known that I loved the book shop so much that it was better to leave me there. It was a time to relax, to enjoy the smell and feel of the books and to take myself out of my day to day world and think about other things.

Bookshops still have this appeal to me now and I can literally spend hours in a bookshop, wandering amongst the shelves and picking up books here and there to look at. I enjoy the texture of books, the various lay outs and the colors as much as the content. Hard covered books are truly my favourites. They are solid, they are serious and they feel real. Convenience and price often mean I buy the soft covered version though. I find it hard not to buy a book (or more than one book) when I go to a book shop. If there’s one on special or one on a particular topic I love (like photography) or one that I’ve read a review about or met the author I just have to have it.
It won’t come as a surprise then that I struggle with ebooks. They just don’t hold the same interest for me. They don’t feel the same. They remind me of work and not relaxation. I can see the convenience and the idea of a small device with thousands of books is kind of appealing. My problem I think is that they aren’t really books – they are merely words on pages.

I’m now in the hunt for a new book that will engage me and take me miles away. I began one but can feel already that it’s not the one. It doesn’t live up to the latest book I finished. It’s just not the same so it will probably hit the pile of bookmarked books in the corner. I must give it a chance though. I’m thinking of a two chapter rule, reading the first two chapters before deciding to give it up. Life is too short to read more than that if I don’t like it by then.



#_Books
#_Love
#_Relaxation
#_Words


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