So I’ve been forever moaning about clearing out my bookshelves now that I’ve got a nice e-reader, which is my primary reading source. Unfortunately I seemed to have reached a certain point in my e-book-guzzling where the stories are sounding more and more alike to me, and I find myself either setting aside a book and then picking up another – only to set that one aside because I’m just not getting into it.
I switched over to some old books I had sitting on my bookshelves for ages – books that I’d started reading and then abandoned for whatever reason – and couldn’t get into those, either. I tried to start over with an anthology of fairy tales by Hermann Hesse, but I couldn’t get into the same frame of mind that required me to fully absorb his writing. I read Demian and Narcissus and Goldmund a while back, and while I loved them, I guess I overdid the Hesse reading and faltered when I bought the anthology. Unfortunately I still couldn’t get into it.
So I spent the last hour scouring through my bookshelves, reconnecting with old books that I read and adding some of my favorite titles to my Goodreads list. I’d love to pick them up to enjoy all over again. The others are books I bought ages ago but haven’t gotten around to reading yet, and I’ve been slapping a hand against my forehead for the oversight. They’re mostly genre fiction – either classic horror or LGBT mystery or something along those lines – and I really should dust those neglected books off and carry on with them.
I know now that I need diversity in my reading. I know that a lot of folks out there can subsist wholly on just one genre; over at Goodreads, some people are only willing to read M/M romance, for instance. That’s perfectly fine, but after over a year of doing exactly that because small e-pubs have been the main source for my e-reading, I’ve reached that saturation point, and I feel stuck in a rut and feeling pretty apathetic toward what I have that’s still unread in my e-reader.
We’ll see how this goes. At the moment, I’m trying to force myself to finish reading a steampunk novel, and after that, I’m giving my e-reader a much-deserved break. You know, like I swore I was going to do days ago.