The Evolution of My Reading (Part 3) – A Meme stolen from abookolive on YouTube

This is the 3^rd (and final) part of the meme stolen from the ever interesting Olive. As before I’ve lifted the questions that I thought would interest my regular readership and ones that I thought would also be interesting, from my PoV, to answer. So……

Do you ever mark or dog-ear your books to ‘make them your own’?

Absolutely not. I’ve lost count of the number of times people pick up a book that I’d read and were astonished that it looked pristine. Very occasionally a book might get damaged due to my carelessness but apart from that they escape largely unmarked.

What trips you up in a book to the point where you consider DNF-ing it?

I really try not to DNF books. A good way to achieve this is to pick the type of books or authors I know I like and give the blurb on the back a good read. I’m pretty good, after decades of experience, at picking books I’m unlikely to DNF. However, even I make mistakes. It’s not totally unusual for me to DNF one book per year. This year I DNF’d TWO and, to be honest, almost DNF’s a third! Simple bad writing is enough for a rejection. If I can see it going badly or just can’t stand the thought of several hundred pages ahead of me then out it goes. Life is just far too short for bad books.   

How do you deal with the overwhelming knowledge that we’ll never read all the books?

As with inevitable things like death you just deal with it. I certainly wouldn’t like to have lived in an era when it WAS possible to read everything in print. What a limited world that would have been. Given a discriminating mind you should be able to instantly ignore a huge proportion of books published each year – at least 50% and probably nearer 80% can simply not even be considered. That helps tremendously. BUT that still leaves at least hundreds of books each year that are (at least potentially) worth reading. You just have to read what you can and hope you don’t waste too much time reading average stuff.

Are there any genres/categories of books you’d like to try out or prioritise more?

As I’m ‘cursed’ with a butterfly-mind I have core interests which I’ll always return to and then sudden or circumstantial interests that I might focus on for weeks, months or even years before finding something else to become obsessed about. There are a few areas that I’d like to spend more time on presently – Espionage is one of them (I’m actually expecting to finish a book about the early history of MI5 today) and I’m developing a bit of a hankering for traditional Fantasy novels which is a bit odd…. We’ll see!

What are your favourite Top 5 non-fiction topics to read about?

British History – almost any period.

Both World Wars

The Ancient World

Politics

Philosophy

How do you feel about autobiographies?

If done well they can be pretty good – except that they too often suffer from being both blinkered and prone to self-publicity. I’d much prefer a more distanced biography.

What is your favourite non-fiction book that has been adapted to the screen – large or small?

No idea!!

What is your favourite genre of books outside non-fiction?

Science-Fiction and Historical novels.

What is a Classic you wish you could read again for the first time?

War of the Worlds by H G Wells or Frankenstein by Mary Shelly. Both excellent books.

What has been the fiction book that surprised you the most this year?

Quite a few did actually by their excellent quality. The last one to surprise me a lot was A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute. Mostly definitely a highlight of the year so far. See my 'Best of 2021' to be posted in Jan 2022.

How many books do you own and what is your read/unread ratio?

I have no realistic idea of how many books I own. If I had to guess it’d be in the region of 5-6 thousand….. Probably….. Read/Unread is somewhere in the region of 60/40, but that’s very much a finger in the air guess.

Would you ever try for a zero TBR?

Even if I only read the books I physically own (to say nothing of my Amazon Wish List) I’m not sure if such a thing is actually possible – unless I live well beyond the average life expectancy. Still adding books as I go makes the very idea of a zero TBR quite laughable!