Authors Electric

Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Do you review how many books you’ve read/listened to this year? I don’t. This is because while I’ve read plenty of books, I always feel I should be reading more. I remind myself I only have so many hours in the day and the better question to ask is did I enjoy the books I read? The answer to that is a definite yes. Life is too short to waste on a boring book. I like to mix reading fiction and non-fiction. I also mix up forms of writing so will read novels, then go on to short story and flash collections, before resuming novel reading again. I mix up reading between formats - hardback, paperback, Kindle. Plus I ensure I read the writing magazines I find most helpful. Within fiction, I like to mix genres too. I try to have a good all-round reading “diet” then. I was fascinated by Churchill’s Wizards (read on Kindle ) which looked at how artists, amongst others, deceived the Nazis using sleight of hand, camouflage, ma...

Big books from monthly book-clubs (growing dusty!)  In my childhood everything- even Mallory Towers! -  was in hardback, and in my early married life I indulged in a book club (remember them?) which delivered a chunky novel once a month.           I think I can pin down my change of heart over hardbacks  to when I asked my young teenage daughter for a copy of the newly published Donna Tart ( The Little Friend ) for Christmas, on the basis it wouldn’t be too big a drain on her pocket money. Being out of the book-buying habit at the time, I'd missed that it was only out in hardback and was filled with guilt as I unwrapped the unwieldy and expensive brute.           From then on, I have never chosen to buy fiction in hardback. (Non-fiction, poetry and illustrated books are a different matter). A novel in my mind is either e-book or tree-book, and a tree-book is a paperback. A ...