Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Multitasking with Reading

Since I acquired a taste for reading very early in life, earlier than most children, I have always read as much as my time permitted it. As multitasking is a way of life for me, this translates into my reading, too.

At the moment, on my computer, with the Nook App, I am reading Drama by John Lithgow (his memoirs), and with the Kindle App, How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and his Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain by Gregory Berns.

On my Nook Device, I have started reading Brava Valentine by Adriana Trigiani.

On my first Kindle, which has text to speech, I am about to finish Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, and I have somewhat started The Edge of Lies by Debra Burroughs. This is my bedroom Kindle, as I listen to some of the books on it at night in the dark.

My other Kindle, Kindle White, travels with me everywhere, and most of the e-books I have read and also the ones I finish the earliest are on that one, because it has an inner adjustable light. I also use this Kindle for borrowing books from Amazon Prime, too. Right now, I am deeply into Daughters of the River Huong by Uyen Nicole Duong.

In addition, I have a flash drive filling up with Gutenberg Editions. Someday, I’ll get to those, but at the moment I use the books inside the flash drive for skimming through or as reference.

Don’t think that I have given up on print books, either. I am very slowly reading Thomas C. Foster’s How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Slowly because I have eyesight troubles with print books, although I like the handling of them better. In fact, any decent reference book I have is a print book.

Before e-books entered the scene and my eyesight was strong, I used to average two to three print books a week. Before e-books, I had never let any book go unfinished. The e-book era has changed that for me.

The initiation of the e-book era has been both a delight and a disappointment. Earlier, I was disappointed with the publishing business for their love of the Bimbo writers and disdain of hard-working, serious authors. Now, there is an enormous amount of publications on the market, and I find a good number of them to be unedited and with faulty construction. This makes me miss the few serious print publishers who cared about the quality rather than the quantity.

Yet, if there is something endearing about an e-book written by a novice writer, I do read it to the end, thinking the writer is new with the craft and he or she deserves some respect for daring to write. I can look the other way, too, if there is a typo or two or maybe a badly constructed sentence, though not too much of those. I mostly stop reading books, specifically fiction, if the author keeps interrupting the story with an agenda, such as to advertise for a belief system, or if the reasoning behind the events are off or a character’s actions are suddenly out of character without a good reason. Another of my pet peeves is the novels in series, in which a novel stops in the middle of a story or leaves ends untied where the main action is concerned. Some writers who do series are phenomenal and their each book is complete in itself; however, a few writers have a misunderstanding about how books in a series should be written.

I have stopped and will stop reading several self-published and e-book-publisher-published books, since I suspect some e-book publishers have lousy editors. Also, I deleted those books I couldn’t read from my devices and will continue doing so because I’d rather spend my time with better books.

In general, however, I like the idea of self-publishing and the easy availability of e-books greatly. I think it is a big help to writing as art, and it rescues serious authors out of bondage. Still, the writers, too, in the throes of excitement for having a published book, should not ignore their responsibility to the craft.

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Prompt: Do you feel obligated to finish all the books you start reading? Why?