Peculiar Proclivities
September 7th, 2010 by Lucy Pratt
Recently, I’ve started to feel like I am stuck in a Reading Rut. Since finishing my degree, I’ve really enjoyed reading for pleasure and not feeling obliged to plough through things I find boring. This has been a bit of a double-edged sword though, because now I don’t have to read anything my taste has become really narrow. If I’m not re-reading my Harry Potter books, which I do all the time because I’m a saddo, everything I read seems to be:
a) Written within the last 50 years.
b) Depressing.
Because I know that I like depressing books written within the last 50 years, I never bother to branch out anymore.
I have decided that this situation needs to be remedied. I thought that the best way to do this was to force myself to read things I wouldn’t normally look at twice. At university, I had to do this a lot. I actually found that quite a few books which sound really boring on paper were quite good. (Evelina by Frances Burney is the main one that springs to mind.)
So, for the next month or so I am going to dedicate each week to reading a selection of books I would ordinarily avoid. My original plan was to just go into the library in town and pick books with weird titles off the shelves. As soon as I went in, though, I was confronted by this:
This is the Mills & Boon section of my local library. It’s HUGE! Disproportionately huge, considering how small the general fiction section is. They also have all of these books in large print. It seemed a shame not to take advantage of this and spend a week reading a few Mills & Boon novels which, I won’t lie, I have avoided like the plague until now.
I have taken a few of these books out, (I picked the ones with the funniest covers), and I will be posting my reviews on Inspired Quill. It will be interesting to see whether my preconceptions about Mills & Boon are accurate or not. They seem to have a bit of a reputation for being badly written, with cringey sex scenes and a slightly misogynistic outlook. But as I’ve never read one, I don’t know if this is right or not. I am weirdly looking forward to the experiment.
No related posts.
Lucy,
I am going through a similar situation! Since my first year of Uni, I have the terrible trouble of picking up books and reading them for pleasure! As I have now graduated and have nothing to do with my time, my condition is even worse. So, I went to the book shop 3 weeks ago and picked up my favorite novel of all time to get me back into the rhythm of reading. And I’ve only made it to chapter two. Sigh, so good luck on your experiment. And may we come to read like we did in our youth.