Skip to main content

Navel-gazing

Here is a marvellous new word I just learned: omphaloskepsis = contemplation of one's navel as an aid to meditation.

I have been involved in a bit introspection lately and one of the the things I have been examining is my reading habits and bookish likes and dislikes. I have come to the conclusion that I have some very fixed, if not positively staid, reading habits.

When I originally started this blog, or rather the blog that spawned this one, which was hosted on tblog and titled 52 Books, I did it in order to shake up my almost fossilised reading habits. I used the blog to keep myself on track with the book-a-week challenge I had set myself, with the aim of reading one book a week by an author or in a genre new to me, and getting off the reread carousel I had been on for the last several years leading up to the challenge. Not that rereading is in itself a bad thing, but when nearly half the considerable amount of books (in my case 150+) one reads in a given year is rereads and there are thousands of books on the TBR list that you haven’t read, something needs to be done. And I did it.

The result was that I now reread fewer than 10 books a year, have added several new authors to my “read more by” list (including three new contenders for my top ten favourite authors list), and I started reading romances again after a hiatus of 15 years.

Now I again feel like my reading habits are getting fossilised. The last time around I rushed headlong into a reading challenge in order to shake things up. This time I am going to sit down and analyse the situation more thoroughly and decide whether I need or even want to change things. I am going to be periodically posting some of the resultant musings to try to analyse why I like or dislike a particular genre or theme. I might even try to overcome some of my dislikes with targeted reading, but some of them are so deeply ingrained that I doubt I’ll be able to budge them. I call these my red flags, for obvious reasons. I think I should be able to deal with the subjects that merely make me uncomfortable, given sufficient analysis, but they may prove to be just as stubborn as the red flags.
Labels:

Comments

George said…
I reread very few books. There are just so many new books to read! I try to alternate fiction and nonfiction, but other than that I just let my mood influence my reading choices.
May 12, 2011 2:55 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 7: Shadow of the Sun by Ryszard Kapuściński (reading notes)

-This reads like fiction - prose more beautiful than one has come to expect from non-fiction and many of the chapters are structured like fiction stories. There is little continuity between most of the chapters, although some of the narratives or stories spread over more than one chapter. This is therefore more a collection of short narratives than a cohesive entirety. You could pick it up and read the chapters at random and still get a good sense of what is going on. -Here is an author who is not trying to find himself, recover from a broken heart, set a record, visit 30 countries in 3 weeks or build a perfectly enviable home in a perfectly enviable location, which is a rarity within travel literature, but of course Kapuściński was in Africa to work, and not to travel for spiritual, mental or entertainment purposes (he was the Polish Press Agency's Africa correspondent for nearly 30 years). -I have no way of knowing how well Kapuściński knew Africa - I have never been there...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to make a simple origami bookmark

Here are some instructions on how to make a simple origami (paper folding) bookmark: Take a square of paper. It can be patterned origami paper, gift paper or even office paper, just as long as it’s easy to fold. The square should not be much bigger than 10 cm/4 inches across, unless you intend to use the mark for a big book. The images show what the paper should look like after you follow each step of the instructions. The two sides of the paper are shown in different colours to make things easier, and the edges and fold lines are shown as black lines. Fold the paper in half diagonally (corner to corner), and then unfold. Repeat with the other two corners. This is to find the middle and to make the rest of the folding easier. If the paper is thick or stiff it can help to reverse the folds. Fold three of the corners in so that they meet in the middle. You now have a piece of paper resembling an open envelope. For the next two steps, ignore the flap. Fold the square diagonally in two. Yo...
25 comments
Read more

Bibliophile discusses Van Dine’s rules for writing detective stories

Writers have been putting down advice for wannabe writers for centuries, about everything from how to captivate readers to how to build a story and write believable characters to getting published. The mystery genre has had its fair share, and one of the best known advisory essays is mystery writer’s S.S. Van Dine’s 1928 piece “Twenty rules for writing detective stories.” I mentioned in one of my reviews that I might write about these rules. Well, I finally gave myself the time to do it. First comes the rule (condensed), then what I think about it. Here are the Rules as Van Dine wrote them . (Incidentally, check out the rest of this excellent mystery reader’s resource: Gaslight ) The rules are meant to apply to whodunnit amateur detective fiction, but the main ones can be applied to police and P.I. fiction as well. I will discuss them mostly in this context, but will also mention genres where the rules don’t apply and authors who have successfully and unsuccessfully broken the rules. 1...
9 comments
Read more