A December Reading Binge — #81
And I’m nowhere near having literary belly ache.
I’ve read eight books in December so far. I’ve started my ninth and we’ll see if I can finish it within the next twenty-four hours (at the time I write this).
The winter holiday season has offered a great opportunity to binge read a load of books on my reading list. I try not to focus on quantity alone, though. I want to take something away from every book I read, whether it is an edifying thought or a new writing style or technique.
I have read a couple of books this month that I would not normally have ever touched. One was a modern murder/legal thriller that I bought because a stranger struck up a conversation with me in a charity bookshop and recommended it to me. He said there was a twist at the end. Yes, there was. But it was overwhelmingly vapid.
Nevertheless, the experience of rattling through a three-hundred-page piece of modern (dare I say it) “trash” in the space of forty-eight hours was a worthwhile experience. To the author’s credit, it was very easy to read. I was able to speed-read it quite comfortably, so this, in itself, was a valuable lesson in how to make a novel easy to read.
