So, the one type of media that I don't think I've ever talked about on this blog is books. It's not that I don't love and appreciate books. I used to be a voracious reader as a kid. However, somewhere along the line I completely stopped reading for fun. It wasn't something that happened overnight. I always wanted to be somebody who read books regularly. I asked for books every Christmas that I inevitably would never actually read, or started but never finished.
For a long time I used the excuse that I was too busy to read. When I was still in school this was true. I suspect a big reason I stopped reading for fun was because I was reading too much in order to finish my degree. I started associating long stretches of text with reading as work. Then social media came along, and I was doing most of my fun reading online. My entertainment media of choice were always movies and television, which I finally had more access to, and could really dig into the way I hadn't as a kid. When I did read physical books for fun, it was usually anthologies. I still collect Stephen King's short story collections.
It took me a while to get into ebooks. I started reading on an iPad when the COVID pandemic came around, and I lost access to the public library. I might not have read books myself for fun, but I always read to my kids as much as I could. Suddenly public domain collections of ebooks became an important source of new reading material. Even after we could get physical books again, I kept reading to my kids using ebooks. I downloaded all the terrible apps and online readers. My kids got older and the books got longer. For Christmases and birthdays my brother kept sending me the kinds of books that won literary awards, and I found myself feeling guilty just looking at them.
Then last year, I read two books roughly around the same time. I read Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn, a fun, tricky, and fairly short book that my brother gave me for my birthday. It was possibly the closest thing to a genre book he had ever sent me, one of those puzzle-like meta creations with a lot of wordplay that only works in the format of a book. I also found a fairly long excerpt of MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios online, a book written by podcasters I regularly listened to, Johanna Robinson and Da7e Gonzales. I decided I wanted to read the whole thing, and whaddaya know - my library didn't have a physical copy, but there was an ebook version available.
I took stock. It didn't take me nearly as long to read these books as I thought it would. I was spending too much time on mobile games and doomscrolling, especially in the wake of the recent election. Why not make a real effort to start reading again in 2025? Get back into the habit of digesting longform content? I decided it was worth doing, and I gave myself a couple of rules to prevent burnout. I could only read one book at a time, and borrow one book at a time from the library, to make sure I finished them. I could make lists of books I wanted to read in the library app, but not a queue, so as not to make the experience too rigid and potentially overwhelm myself. I was also not allowed to read any books that didn't look like fun.
So, what did I want to read? When I really thought about it, the books that I had always liked best were science-fiction and fantasy books - and not the classics either, which could sometimes get awfully stuffy. I preferred the books with some humor, like the ones by Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. I liked the ones that offered some thrills and chills, like the ones by Michael Crichton. I also remain a gigantic movie and television nerd, so anything being readied for an adaptation was also a plus. Mostly, however, I was curious about what was out there since the last time I'd really bothered to browse the sci-fi/fantasy shelves twenty years ago. I recognized several of the authors by reputation, but I'd never read anything they wrote. So recent books would be getting priority.
At the time of writing I'm six books into this experiment. I've read three funny science-fiction books, including ones written by John Scalzi and Andy Weir. One horror novel, not by Stephen King. One Barbara Hambly romantic-fantasy novel written decades before "romantasy" became a thing. One lesbian Hollywood romance which I read by accident, because the title was unreasonably similar to the book I had meant to read. I enjoyed it though, so I don't mind. I can finish a 300 page book in a week, but I try to keep a slower pace than that so I don't rush. So far, so good. Nothing amazing or life-changing, but no real strikeouts either.
I don't feel the need to write any reviews of these books at this time, but I'll update again in a few months to see where we are.
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