A bookish goat
or what kind of reader am I
I’ve always been a reader. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t reading. I don’t remember a time when books were not on my mind. Always visiting bookshops, always looking for my next read, always thinking about a story. I love books and I love stories, I’m fascinated by all the ways of looking at the world. For me reading is like talking to different people and hearing what they’re thinking, what they are seeing.
Reading is for me just as important as eating. I’m also just as cranky when I don’t read for a day as I am when I’m hungry. People tell me that I’m addicted and I tell them that they’re probably right, but it’s better than heroine, so I’m not really worried.
In May I’ve read more than 30 books. It was a lot, but it also was a perfect distraction for my anxious brain. Reading this much worked it’s magic, but it also got me thinking about what kind of reader I am.
I already knew that I’m a goat, as in I will reading any genre as long as the book’s theme interests me. I also easily DNF books, because I believe that some stories are simply not for me and some are not for this particular moment in my life. So instead of reading something that doesn’t work for me, I move on to the next read. And there are so many books to be read!
I’m also very bad in sticking to a TBR list and reading all the books that are waiting for me at home and on my e-readers. I’m always on a lookout for something else, something I don’t have. So I bring a few books from the library and put them on the table to read quickly. But it is exactly when I want to read all the books that were already waiting at home. And so I read the books from the home piles and from the e-shelves and extend the loan on library books again and again and sometimes I even bring them back without reading.
I like having options, I like to be able to choose my next read on a whim. That’s why May was hard, at some point I even wanted to stop with the challenge, because it made me choose my reads very carefully. They needed to be relatively short and yes, you guessed it, this was when I felt like reading big books.
I also like to read multiple books at the same time. I always have a bed book on one of my e-readers as it’s my favourite way to read in bed. I can lie on my side, turn the light off and disappear into the story until my eyes tire and I’m ready to sleep. And then I almost always have two or three other books going. Mostly in different languages, but sometimes they’re all in English, just one is fiction and the other non-fiction and if there’s a third one, it would be fiction, but very different from the first. This way it is possible for me to read something that suits my mood on any given day or moment. Because for me not every book works well with breakfast and not every book is suitable for reading in the garden.
So tell me, what kind of reader are you?
I used to be a voracious reader. As a child I was never without a book. Sadly my MECFS has robbed me of the ability to read large tracts of text and reading is a struggle. My lovely hubby reads aloud to me every night at bed time so I don’t miss out too much though.