Well, we’re onto the final day of our summer blog hop and what a summer it’s been.
Last stop of the tour was with Head of Zeus – the mother ship of my publishers Aria Fiction.
I wrote about the way we read….
Here’s a link to http://headofzeus.com/ and on Aria — aria fiction
And here’s the post:
It is true that readers are readers – no matter where you go.
Any socially awkward moment is obliterated between two readers once they stumble over a shared love of books. If they have similar tastes that’s great, but if their reading piles are completely different, very often that’s all the better. There is the opportunity to win the other person over, there is no need to compete and you can spend a while trilling your way through your favourite books and by sharing the story with them you pull up your anchor and head towards far flung places leaving discomfort far behind.
The truth is, however that there are as many different kinds of booklovers as there are readers! I talk to lots of people about what they’re reading now, and invariably conversations move along to the best books ever, who, how, when and where we read. I think it’s safe to say that for the most part readers fall into a couple of categories, the question is of course; which one are you?
True Blue Readers:
These bookworms read only one genre all the way. They find what they like and they stick with it forever and ever and ever. My aunt was like this. She adored Mill’s and Boon books. In her later years, she became hard of hearing and they became, for a large part of her day, her whole world. Often she would sit in a comfortable chair and lose herself in the world of handsome Mr Darcy’s, beautiful if somewhat uncertain protagonists who eventually get their man. As time rolled on and my aunt got older she began to re-read books that she’d enjoyed decades earlier – and yes, she said they were every bit as good again!
Over and Back Readers:
For those of us who like more than one genre, this is very often how we read. I have a friend who loves crime fiction but also adores women’s fiction. So she reads both genre’s back to back. According to her, it stops her getting ‘overload’ of one type of story. Some bibliophiles if they have read something particularly harrowing or touching will go for something a little lighter to follow up. For some it is a desire to soak in the richness of one story before moving on to another that will deeply affect them, so there is a break into something a little lighter. For others, it is a love of both genres and the desire to read in each.
The Eclectic Reader:
This booklover has the kind of bookshelves that you browse and wonder if in fact, they just picked up the books randomly and perhaps they never read a book in their lives! For this reader, a book has to speak to them. Books they chose to spend time with will have appealed to them for any number of reasons, from the cover to perhaps overhearing an author on a radio talk show. Some books will resonate because they detail experiences closely related to the readers own, others because they are so far removed from anything the reader is likely to experience in ‘real’ life.
Best Sellers:
These are the readers who buy according to the sticker in the bookshop. They’ve read every bestseller going – after they’ve been done to death. Perhaps they are unimaginative readers. On the other hand, perhaps they are clever, in that, books that make it to the top of the best sellers list are sure to be well edited, likely to be well written and chances are they are books well worth reading. (The flip side of course is that while you’re reading what everyone else is reading, somebody is out there discovering new books and maybe helping to form what will ultimately sit on those best seller shelves and influence future buying trends and in turn, your future reading landscape!
The Pioneer:
This is the bookworm who’s always able to recommend a book worth reading that no-one else has heard of yet. They are hazy on how they source brilliant reads, as though good undiscovered books just fall into their hands. Some are readers who have a knack of coming upon books that are interesting, quirky or just yet unheard of. Make no mistake though, these are discerning people who search out tasteful books as surely as others follow the cruise fashion trends or catalogue the arrival of the first swallows and then uplift us all by announcing summer has arrived.
The Book Floozy:
Here’s the reader who’ll read anything and everything, they are in no way selective, in that whatever is handy will do. If their book is finished, then they will read whatever you have finished. For the Book Floozy the arrival of the e-book and the freedom to choose any book at any hour has probably brought with it the kind of fraught tension that shoe collectors get in a Louboutin store. So many books to pick from and youhave to select one to read now!!!
The Bookaholic:
This is the reader with several books on the go at once. I have to confess, that before children and book deals I very much fell into this category. Still I’ll have up to three books on the go, generally they’ll be differing types, so I may have a women’s fiction story or a crime novel, something from the inspirational bookshelves and number three will invariably be a shortie that will either be funny or historical fiction. Now, of course, it takes me longer to get through them!
I’m betting that I’m only tipping the iceberg on these reading habits, that there are indeed as many reading types as there are booklovers out there. The thing is, that whatever type you are, you stick with it because after all, what is reading for if not to indulge your passion for the written word and escape the humdrum of the world around us?