Readers Anonymous - are you an addict?

Do your palms sweat at the thought of a new Stephen King hitting the shelves? Do you neglect your friends in order to curl up between the pages? Do you have to charge your Kindle more than twice a month?  Are there books in every room of your house?

 If you answered yes to any of the questions above then you may be addicted to reading.

This addiction is widespread and the side effects are a stronger vocabulary, an imaginative mind and a better understanding of what makes things tick.

Check out this article HERE by Tara Block which lists fifty signs that you may be afflicted with a reading addiction. If so you may be able to get help....but would you want it?

9 Books on Writing and Reading

I came across this article HERE which will be of interest to Archive readers.

Hardly anything does one’s mental, spiritual, and creative health more good than resolving to read more and write better. Today’s reading list addresses these parallel aspirations. And since the number of books written about reading and writing likely far exceeds the reading capacity of a single human lifetime, this omnibus couldn’t be — shouldn’t be — an exhaustive list. It is, instead, a collection of timeless texts bound to radically improve your relationship with the written word, from whichever side of the equation you approach it.

Fine the full article and list of books HERE

Is Reading for Pleasure a Dying Art?

Novelist Ruth Rendell appeared on Radio 4's Arts program, Front Row last week and set alarm bells ringing by stating that reading for pleasure has become a minority pastime, almost a specialist activity. The 83 year old author bemoaned the fact that people are no longer ashamed to admit that they don't read fiction, which was something that only twenty years ago was unthinkable.

The story was picked up by a number of newspapers with both The Guardian and The Telegraph devoting column inches to the death of reading. The thought that this may be true depresses the hell out of me, and I suspect the majority of Archive readers will feel the same way. I read regularly, always have and I've always got a book (fiction) on the go as well as having written a fair few and hoping to write a lot more.

I Googled, 'Death of Reading' and within the blink of an eye my request had traveled the virtual highways, gone through the secret government surveillance bots and returned a mass of interesting articles, as well as a couple of pornography sites. Are there any keywords not used by pornography web sites? I found the piece on the blog Poetic Serendipity to be interesting. Written and posted back in 2010 it was concerned over a survey, the results of which can be downloaded as a PDF HERE, and again made for depressing reading for the writer.


'It is now possible to see the decline of literature in normal life.' Ruth Rendell

So is reading dying? I'm not so sure but I think, rather I know that the traditional ways of obtaining fiction are if not dying then at least being reshaped into something new.eBooks may have been around for a long while but it's only in recent years that they have become mainstream. And it's no use arguing that eBooks are not mainstream because they are. These days I think I see more people reading on electronic devices than I do physical books. So I think eBooks will be the Savior of fiction reading and that reading will enjoy a resurrection, a digital resurrection that ensures that reading fiction is something that will be done for a long, long time to come.


I bloody well hope so.

The Reading Bug

As if physical books didn't have enough to deal with now that the digital revolution is in full swing, but the New York Times are reporting that physical books could introduce a lot of nasties into your life.

 The NY Times is reporting that libraries are trying to deal with the problem of bedbugs infesting their returned books.  Evidently, the parasitic insects like to crawl out at night and hide in books. According to the article, some library patrons have decided never to borrow a book again after receiving an infested book. Reports of infestations have come from libraries in Wichita, Los Angeles, Seattle, and others. According to The Gothamist, NYC seems to be doing pretty well with only a few infestations.

The problem is widespread and Angelica McAdoo, a jewelry designer used to bring home a stack of books from the Los Angeles Central Library — until Mrs. McAdoo heard that the library had had a bedbug scare in September. She had already battled bedbugs in her two-bedroom apartment in East Hollywood and hired an exterminator, who sprayed the perimeter of her bookshelves with pesticide, among other precautions. For now, she is buying books at Target and is ambivalent about borrowing library books again. “I will not step foot in a library ever again — right now,” she told The New York Times. 

The Hachette Book Group at 237 Park Avenue recently had to close their offices when they became infested and the problem was treated.

eBooks it seems then are the safer option for although they can sometimes suffer with bugs they are certainly not of the icky crawly variety.

Full story HERE

THE JOY OF READING

If I had a penny for every time someone has told me they have no time to read, I'd be a wealthy man. According to a recent statistic only 15% of people read regularly in the UK and 40% said that they didn't even have any books in the home. It's a sad state of affairs - indeed I have friends who never read, claiming that if a book was any good it would be a movie. Now movies are all very well but reading is a much more encompassing experience. Don't these people realise that with a movie you only see the story, but with a book you live it?

With a book a much greater level of involvement is required than simply sinking down in front of a screen but the rewards too are far greater. I have been a constant reader since I was a kid - I've always got something on the go - if there are no books around I'll grab a magazine or even a comic book. Most of my free time is spent reading. Now I'll accept that people often live busy lives but anyone who claims not to have time to read, simply doesn't want to read bad enough. A few snatched minutes a day are enough to get lost in a good story. We readers read everywhere - while waiting for a bus, on the train, the plane, in bed last thing at night, seated in the garden, laying in the bath.

I read in two different ways. The most common way is as a reader, during which I enjoy the story for its own sake and the second is as a writer where I enjoy the resonance of the language used. With favourite books I try and analyse what it is about the book I found so compulsive, what it was that kept me turning the pages. I feel that books have taught me more about human nature than people have themselves. Even the most escapist genre fiction will, when done well, have something important to say about ourselves.

Books are simply wonderful things. With a good book you can be transported anywhere in the world, or indeed off the world, without leaving the comfort of your armchair. You can experience sensations that are alien to your normal life, you can enter dark and dangerous environments and emerge unscathed but strangely wiser for the experience. You can occupy the minds of the heroic or the sick and twisted. You can for the time spent between the covers enter the world of the characters in the book and experience their emotions on a primal level, you can, for a short time, become those characters.

Books are wonderful thing.

You not missing anything if you don't read - You're missing everything.

Reading for pleasure

There are those that look down upon reading simply for pleasure, and consider it worthless. Novels, they say, must reflect issues that matter to the times they are written - a story must, they say, tackle the Iraq war, or a homosexual struggling for acceptance amongst his peers, or the immigrant facing racism and bureaucracy, or the imminent extinction of the Grey Throated Wobble Tit. The Booker prize is won year after year by such books.

Genre fiction is sneered upon, considered silly inane trash with as much depth as the average soap opera. But it is this attitude that has turned generation after generation of children away from reading. And yet the attitude that genre fiction is worthless is complete bollocks - Conan Doyle, now considered a master of literature, wrote genre fiction, as did H.G. Wells. And what are the works of superb stylist Raymond Chandler if not genre fiction? Robert E. Howard is another case in point, he all but invented the sword and sorcery fantasy subgenre and his Conan tales were mostly sneered upon by the intelligentsia. Silly really because one can go back to the dawn of the written word to see the formation of genre fiction - the Anglo Saxon epic, Beowulf for instance. And even before that, when cave dwellers sat around the fire, scratching their arses, you can bet the tales they told could have been bunged between paper covers and placed on the genre shelves.

What's wrong with filling a pipe or grabbing a bag of sweets and curling up with a good mystery, or western, or horror story, or fantasy? Once the shops were filled with such books and it's a pity we couldn't bring them back.

Reading should be enjoyable and that's the message to get across if we are to encourage young readers back into the collective of readers (sounds very Star Trek, that!). In many ways writers themselves are to blame - read interview after interview and you will come across deep analysis of their work when the emphasis should be placed on the entertainment value. We all want to entertain our readers.We want to prove that books can provide an experience quite unlike anything else, a far deeper experience and greater involvement with the story than a mere movie or, dare I say it, a computer game can provide.

And we are at an important crossroads now - with the rise of the Internet and eBooks, we are able to get our work onto all those cool devices the kids carry around with them. And don't forget the Harry Potter series proved that children, if given the right material, will lap it up. There are scores of online fiction sites that provide well written, enjoyable stories that could, maybe, introduce some young dude or dudette to a lifetime of reading pleasure. Thieves Jargon, A Twist of Noir and Beat to a Pulp are just three fiction sites worth Googling - should the word googling be capitalized? I guess not but who cares, you know what I mean.

All the cool kids read!