Hey ho, squiders. Madness! And so forth.
(Still 3/6 on the July books.)
I don’t know about you, squiders, but whenever I go someplace for a few days for a more relaxing sort of vacation, and there’s books sitting around, I tend to read them.
I always take books with me. But there’s something about a book that can only be read while you are in that particular location that is very interesting to me.
I suspect this is at least somewhat related to my childhood. I was a voracious reader, and while I got hooked on science fiction and fantasy fairly early, I also tended to read whatever I could get my hands on between library visits. My dad’s book that had every Marx brothers movie told in stills and bits of dialogue. Art books. Things my mother told me absolutely to not read, like her Interview with the Vampire and Dick Francis mystery books.
At the library, too, I enjoyed the thrill of the hunt. I would wander the stacks, looking for the scifi/fantasy sticker, and then I would take home anything that caught my interest. (These often turned out to be middle books in series, but that never deterred me. I did once read the last book of a series though, and I was so mad about how it ended that I’ve never read anything else by that author, though in general I would probably like her stuff.) I did have some favorite books and series that I would go for, but I always seemed to come home with more.
(While I do not tend to wander the library stacks anymore, I do still end up with unplanned books when I go in. I always check the new books, and any special carousels the librarians have set up.)
When we were younger, my spouse’s family had a beach cottage up in Michigan that we would go to for a week or so. There was never any set itinerary for these trips, though I would often cook dinner a few nights a week. Sometimes we’d go sit on the beach or wander over to the lighthouse, or hike up the dunes, or get out the tandem bike and meander through the backroads outside the cottage community. We’d go into town for dinner every now and then. But in general, we were left to our own devices.
There were books throughout the cottage. I’d scour them to see if there were new ones, and would generally get through a few. There was one, written by L. Frank Baum under a pseudonym that was autobiographically about the cottage community, that I read a few times.
Last week, we went and stayed at a mountain resort for a few days–same sort of idea, just chill and occasionally hike somewhere–and I found an old book from 1923 called The Owls’ House. I like to read old books occasionally. They’re so very different from modern novels, and as a writer it is interesting to see how structure, plot, and viewpoint has changed over the years.
(I did have a writing friend tell me once that you shouldn’t read any book older than 5 years, because doing so would train you for writing to the current market, which is probably a good idea. He is a bestselling fantasy author now, though he wasn’t at the time of the conversation. I just hate it.)
My reading tastes have always been fairly eclectic, so reading a single genre in a single time period drives me up the wall.
And, quite frankly, I am probably going to continue to read any old book I find sitting around if it sounds interesting and I have time to read it before I have to leave wherever I am.
How do you find books to read, squider? Do you ever just pick up a random book and give it a read?
