The "life/work/reading" balancing act

I used to find it strange when someone said that their personal reading time suffered because of school, or work, or social life. I always found time to read. Always. Even if it was just for those few minutes before falling asleep. I managed to do that through college, wedding/marriage and a couple different jobs.

Now I work in editing. I literally correct grammar and spelling for a living. For 40+ hours a week I scrutinize ads and listings, looking for mistakes. It’s a great job, I actually really enjoy it! However… for the first time in my life, my reading has suffered.

I settle down, open a book… and start looking for errors. Not on purpose! It’s all habit now. I find that my reading speed is slower than what it used to be. I’m used to reading slowly now, scanning for mistakes.  Even worse, finding mistakes in published pieces! I understand that mistakes happen. (I work in editing/publishing for heaven’s sake. I understand mistakes happen!) But once I find a mistake I get thrown out of the world I was trying to disappear into. I complain to my husband and usually just get a blank stare back. Reading is easy for him, incorrect punctuation and improper grammar don’t bother him in the least.

The solution? (Well, not exactly a solution, but a happy alternative.) AUDIOBOOKS. I’ve always enjoyed them, but now they’re a lifeline. Within the first week of my job I learned something absolutely delightful: My coworkers are audiobook junkies. I will never run out of books to listen to! We have a whole library of audiobooks here at work. We are even allowed to listen to them while working! I have one ear bud in 90% of the work day, listening to books and music. My coworkers are the same. It’s seriously a dream job. (Not to mention that working with such bookish people is a delight in and of itself.)

Can anyone relate? What are your best tricks to continue to enjoy reading? Share in the comments below!

Bookish Holiday Traditions

The holidays are the time for sharing, for caring, and—yes—for reading! Seriously, what's better than curling up with a blanket, a mug of your hot beverage of choice, and a lovely book (perhaps one that Santa brought) while it's snowing outside? I can't think of much.

The holidays are also the time for traditions, and we want to hear about yours! Specifically, what are your bookish holiday traditions? I personally don't have any, and I'd really like to start one...or more!

My husband, for example, always read The Night Before Christmas aloud with his parents on Christmas Eve when he was growing up, each reading a portion of the story in turn. (This is a lovely tradition, but I'm glad I haven't yet been wrangled into participating because the only thing I hate more than listening to people read aloud while trying to follow along in the text is reading aloud myself. Sorry, honey.)

Another delightful tradition that always makes the rounds on social media this time of year is Iceland's jólabókaflóð, or "Christmas Book Flood." Icelanders traditionally give and receive books on Christmas Eve, and spend the rest of the evening enjoying their new treasures. This is something I'd love to have as a tradition someday, but most of my family members probably wouldn't be interested, unfortunately. (Maybe when my husband and I have kids and start spending holidays in our own home rather than traveling, we can start enforcing this tradition!)

Something I would love to start, but would be difficult to make an in-person tradition since we move so much, is a holiday book-swap. Set a date and time for people to bring, say, five books they love (their own copies or new copies) to share with others. Everyone gets to sit and hang out and drink wine and eat snacks and then, at a specified time, you can go decide which books you want to take home.

As I'm thinking this through, I'm considering two options: 1) you bring (for example) 5 books, but you can only take home 3, and all the extra books are donated, or 2) you bring however many you want, but you can only take home the same number you bring. This might be tough to enforce, though—maybe you'd get a different colored bracelet depending on how many books you brought, or a badge, or a punch card. Hmmm. Any ideas?

Of course, I'd also love to start the tradition where people stop saying "but what else?" when I tell them that I want books for Christmas, but...

What are your bookish holiday traditions? What traditions do you want to start?

Eating While Reading: The Ultimate Pasttime

Or at least it is for me. It combines my two favorite things—the only way it could be better would be if I could somehow sleep at the same time. (Yes, I’m a grown-ass adult and sleep is still one of my favorite things. Don’t you be messing with my sleep.)

Anyway, I’ve started thinking about what makes reading and eating at the same time so enjoyable, other than the straight facts of FOOD and BOOKS. Combining two of life’s greatest pleasures certainly is a factor, but for me personally, I think there’s something else there as well.

A lot of it for me is the comfort aspect, I think. Both food and books have always been my top sources of comfort (one of the many reasons it’s so hard for me to ever lose weight—I love food and I’d rather read than exercise) and the combination of the two is just utterly heavenly. I’ve gotten away a little bit from rereading as much as I used to, thanks to blogging and wanting to have a good amount of new content for reviews (and BEA, can’t forget BEA), but back in the day I would read the same books pretty much over and over.

This constant rereading was due to a few factors: first, I had no money of my own to purchase new books (or the means to get to the bookstore on my own), and when I did (i.e., college), I had very limited space to store them; second, I’ve always been a pretty quick reader, so even when my parents or grandparents did treat me to half a dozen books at Borders, I’d finish them within two weeks and then feel too guilty to ask to go back again; and third, I know what I like and I like what I know, and I’ve always been that way—so I never really had any problem rereading my books, and in some cases preferred rereading old favorites to trying anything new. In fact, I remember finding it quite shocking that some of my friends never reread books. How do you know which book is your favorite, then, if it’s not the one you’ve read the most??? Honestly, some people.

Food, too, has always been a comfort thing for me. This frustrates my husband to no end—he’s all about the variety in foods, and I’m all about consistency. I could eat the same thing for dinner all week and be perfectly content (as long as it’s delicious, of course) whereas he would rather eat something mediocre all week as long as it was different each time. I’m pretty picky, and nothing devastates me like ordering something that sounds amazing at a restaurant and finding that I don’t like it. To me, food disappointment is the absolute worst kind of disappointment, because food is so important to me. It sounds silly, but it’s true!

So really, combining food and books is a no-brainer for me! But what I’m wondering is: is it the same for you all? Do you have a favorite reading snack (or perhaps a drink)? I took to Facebook and Reddit while writing this post to see what my friends and some internet strangers would say. Here are some preliminary answers:

Anonymous Facebook friend: Tea. For everything there is a season, and there is also a tea. Mystery book? Jasmine tea. Sad book? Green tea. Comedy? Light black tea.

Anonymous Reddit commenter: I enjoy tea or coffee while I read. Though not fully snack, in the fall and winter I enjoy a pipe and mulled wine by the fireplace while I read, it's quite a relaxing thing to do.

Anonymous Facebook friend: Fruit juice is good. Like those bolthouse juices. Then you feel healthy and well-read.

Anonymous Reddit commenter: Always tea. Made with organic tea leaves and a dash of milk. And always in a matching teapot and teacup.

What’s your answer? I’ll update this post as I get more answers from friends and strangers alike, but tea seems to be a big one! I’ve never been a tea person so I don’t really get this, but to each their own!

Edit, 6:35pm

Based on the comments I've gotten here and elsewhere, tea is the number one reading accompaniment. I'm not all that surprised, honestly. Coffee, wine, and cocoa are also popular, particularly on rainy/snowy/cold days. Popcorn has also been making much more of an appearance than I would have expected. 

Anonymous Facebook friend: English tea with the Brontë sisters; cocoa or a chai latte and pumpkin cookies (fall only) with Harry Potter.

Anonymous Reddit commenter: Popcorn, made in a big pot on the stove, is my favorite reading snack. I'll have water and either coffee or yerba mate nearby when reading during the day, substitute wine for the caffeine in the evenings.

Anonymous Facebook friend: Lately I've been eating popcorn while reading a book. I also often eat lunch while reading a book, so that is a variety of things. Coffee goes with everything. Wine is a favorite too.

Anonymous Reddit commenter: Coffee and either nuts (almost any easy kind) or dried cranberries. Mmmm.

Anonymous Facebook friend: It depends more on the weather than the book, coffee or tea if it's cold/winter/raining, iced tea or soda if its warm/summer. As for food - sweets or basically any munchies.

Tell me in the comments what your favorite reading snack or drink is! 

Let’s Make A Deal!

Yesterday, I (Bridget) talked about deal-breakers when it comes to the books I read. Now let’s talk about some dealmakers! Like I said yesterday, I’m pretty picky with the books and genres that I read, but there are a few things that will always inspire me to pick up a book!

1. Comparisons to books I like. I’m not proud of this, because I think comparing every new thriller written by a woman in the past few years to Gone Girl does everyone a disservice for a variety of reasons, but dang does it make it easy to pick books. I requested Above through NetGalley for its comparisons to Room and The Lovely Bones; I picked up The Glittering World in part because of its comparisons to TheOcean at the End of the Lane. I picked up The Never List and The SilentWife in part because of their comparisons to Gone Girl.

2. Published by a certain author. We all have auto-buy lists; mine, until recently has been pretty short, only consisting of Stephen King and J. K. Rowling. But in the past few years, I’ve added Gillian Flynn, Paula Hawkins, and several other authors to my auto-buy list. In the case of most of these authors, I’ve read several of their books and enjoyed them all; the only exception, currently, is Ms. Hawkins, whose debut novel The Girl on the Train was nothing short of amazing. I’ll definitely be first in line to buy her next novel, whatever it is!

3. Horror/thriller elements. I’m not going to buy every horror or thriller novel ever, of course, but having those elements definitely adds a lot of points in a book’s favor. It’s hard to say exactly which of these elements and in what combinations will always make me pick up a book, but here are a few that come to mind:

- disease pandemics a la The Stand
- “Race against the clock” type stories, a la Tick Tock, Ready Player One
- Man versus wilderness/impossible survival, a la The Martian

There are a lot of others, but they’re a little bit too nebulous to put into words. It’s sort of like that judge said about obscenity: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.

4. Good reviews by bloggers I know and trust. That’s not to say I’ll read every book any blogger I read ever likes, but blogging as part of a community means learning your fellow bloggers’ taste in books, and there are definitely a few whose reviews I almost always trust—especially because there are so few bloggers who review primarily non-YA, so when I find one, I almost immediately follow them. (Sorry, is that creepy?) I have a smaller pool to choose from than most bloggers, but it’s sort of nice because it’s not as overwhelming.

(I’d like to note that, at this point in writing, I was having trouble coming up with a fifth dealmaker so I asked my husband what he’d look for in a book if he was buying me a book that wasn’t on my wish list. After I shot down a few things he suggested, he got frustrated and said, “I don’t know why you like the books you like!” Me neither, friend. Me neither.)

5. Good covers. I know you should never judge a book by its cover, and I don’t usually judge by a cover on its own, but a good cover can definitely increase a book’s odds of ending up in my bag. Similarly, a bad cover can kill a book’s chances of ever ending up on my shelves. Again, it’s hard to quantify exactly what makes a good or bad cover, but I know it when I see it!

What are your deal-makers?

Bridget Talks Deal-Breakers.

I’m a picky person. I’m a picky eater (getting better, though); I’m a picky music-listener; and I’m incredibly picky about what I read. Blogging has really helped me expand my horizons, particularly through things like year-long reading challenges and getting to read ARCs. I also love getting to see reviews of books I probably would never have heard of if not for this amazing blogging community!

Though I certainly read more diversely now than I did a few years ago, there are a few things that have remained deal-breakers in my reading life. Here are some of the worst offenders, and let me know what yours are in the comments!

1. Fragments, fragments everywhere! Fragments, though not something you’d want to put in an essay, are often acceptable as a stylistic choice for creative writing. They particularly make sense in dialogue, because real-life dialogue is rarely ever grammatical the way writing is. But when there are more than two fragments in a row, or more than three or so to a page (on average), it gets a little tiresome. I’ve particularly noticed this in YA series like The Hunger Games and Divergent, but it’s also come up (and bugged me severely) in adult novels like The Silent Girls.

2. Love triangles, or really any superfluous romance in general. There’s a reason I don’t read romance novels: they’re full of clichés, they’re unrealistic at best and harmful at worst (looking at you, Fifty Shades), and frankly, they’re BORING because you know exactly how they’re going to end. (Okay, I guess there are several reasons I don’t read romance novels.) I don’t need books to have absolutely no romance whatsoever, because that’s almost impossible to find these days, but I quite appreciate when romance takes a back seat to whatever else is happening in the story.

That’s not to say that I don’t like stories about love, because I do, and I’ve read a bunch of books recently that focus on love greater than that between two people (The Ocean at the End of the Lane and The Glittering World in particular come to mind). But romance is something I’m much less interested in.

3. Bad or nonexistent editing. I’m not talking about in ARCs, either; I’m talking about actual published works. A typo here or there is excusable—I don’t think I’ve ever read a book where I haven’t found a typo at some point—but willy nilly errors in tense or forgetting a verb in a sentence is totally unforgivable. I just read The Silent Girls by Eric Rickstad and while the story was okay the writing was unthinkably bad, so this particular deal-breaker is sort of close to the surface of my mind at the moment.

4. Pretension. Ugghhhh this has got to be one of the worst things to deal with as a reader: an author’s unstoppable pretension. Of course, everyone interprets writing differently, so our definitions of pretension might differ. I’m thinking along the lines of Jonathan Safran Foer, whose every word just oozes “look how smart I am!” Similarly, James Joyce and his utterly incomprehensible (except to the elite few, of course) writing make my blood boil.

Something I’ve never understood is why writers write if they don’t want people to understand what they’re saying. What was Joyce’s goal in writing Ulysses so that it was absolutely inaccessible to anyone at all except himself (and eventually Joyce scholars who studied every minute aspect of his life in order to understand it)? I can’t help but think that he must have thought so much of himself for publishing this impenetrable novel that scholars have puzzled over for decades. Either that or he’s been punking us for almost a hundred years now.

5. Character-driven stories versus plot-driven stories. Don’t get me wrong; great characters make a book. But I want a plot, too. I want exciting things to happen—the scarier the better (I’m a huge horror junkie). I think this is maybe why I didn’t like The Virgin Suicides as much as I wanted to or as much as I expected to based on what I’d heard about it; it’s mainly a character study of the five Lisbon sisters by a group of boys who lived in the same neighborhood. Things happen, but it’s not exactly exciting.

The one exception I’ve found to this rule so far is J. K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy. There wasn’t a whole lot of plot there either, but the characters were just so incredibly drawn that, after a while, it was impossible not to be invested in their stories. (Of course, it took me about 200 pages to get invested, so I don’t blame you if you quit before that.)

6. Getting hit over the head with the author’s morals or politics or anything that I didn’t actually pick up the book for. Like I said above, I read primarily for plot; I don’t want to be proselytized to. All stories have morals, of course, and all authors have biases. But if your bias is glaringly obvious, I’m either not going to read your book or, if I do read it, I’m probably not going to review it very well. 

What are your deal breakers when it comes to books? 

On Reading Diversely

Hi all! I’m participating in the Dive Into DiversityChallenge hosted by Rather be Reading and Reading Wishes this year, and I’m enjoying it so far, but I’ve run into a roadblock or two. The biggest one, and the one I’d love some input on, is: what does it mean to read diversely?

One of the suggested titles to read for this challenge was Ready Player One by Ernest Cline. I really enjoyed it, and I’d recommend it to anyone who liked Ender’s Game and/or enjoys some good 80s nostalgia. However, I’m not really sure where “diversity” comes in. The main character, Wade, is a white male, as is the author—not very diverse. On the other hand, Wade is poor, as is much of the country in this vision of the future. Does that make it diverse? (Economically diverse?)

People in the OASIS can be whatever color, age, gender, etc. that they want; you can also be a witch or a wizard or any manner of fantastical creature. Some of the people Wade meets along the way have taken advantage of this, using avatars that don’t match their real-life gender, age, or race. We don’t find this out until toward the end, though, so I don’t know if it qualifies as “diverse.”

My next Dive Into Diversity read is probably going to be Little Peach by Peggy Kern. Peggy is white, but women are still disadvantaged in the publishing world, so does that alone make it diverse? Is it the topic—underage prostitution—that makes it diverse? I don’t yet know what race or sexual orientation the protagonist is; if she’s a PoC, does that make it diverse, even if it’s written by a white straight woman? I’ve also read Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones for the challenge—I would definitely consider that one diverse, as it’s written by a woman of color about women of color.

When you try to read diversely, what “boxes” do you check before you consider a book diverse? Does the book have to be written by an author of color? A woman? An LGBTQ author? Or does the book just have to have diverse characters (LGBTQ, people of color, economic diversity, differently-abled, etc.)? But what if the diverse characters are written by someone who isn’t “diverse”? Does that make it less authentic/less diverse? I want to say yes, but is that fair?

Sorry if I rambled a bit—there are a lot of questions here. I’d love to hear your opinions on any and all of them!