Me, a Reader

It’s definitely true that the best way to learn to be a writer is to read first. I devoured books as a child and then again when I discovered romance in my late teens. As life got busier, I read almost exclusively romance, the tension of the developing relationship dragging me in no matter what was going on around me, occasionally staying up way too late to finish a book in one sitting.

When I was younger, ebooks hadn’t made the inroads that they have now, so I mainly read historical romances (Amanda Quick, Stephanie Laurens, Julia Quinn, among others), as well as the greats Nora Roberts and Susan Elizabeth Phillips, because they were the ‘Love Hypothesis’-type books of the time (the high-tension, page-turning, chemistry-filled romances) and I just inhaled them.

Now, as a writer, I’m noticing an evolution in my reading that I’m not entirely happy about. When a book has started to take shape, I always prefer to write than to read (maybe even when I’m banging my head against the wall at the start of a new manuscript, I probably prefer to write than to read). Now I spend so much of my time writing, forming characters, puzzling out goals-motivation-conflict, building a story towards a climax – and avoiding too many adverbs, repeated words or redundancies – it’s difficult to pick up a romance and not think about what I would have done differently. This is rather annoying, actually, especially because I have definitely also learned in my years of publishing that readers have different tastes and enjoy different things. So, where I notice a thread of tension sagging, a different reader might enjoy the respite. I might get hung up on a love interest behaving aggressively towards an ex of the main character (this is a pet peeve for me because makes me lose all trust in that love interest and then I’m not rooting for the couple any more – disappointing), but I know lots of readers adore this trope and can switch off the logic of character consistency (i.e. this behaviour actually shows he can’t handle his aggression, which is a worrying trait). But as a writer, I can’t switch that off.

What I’ve also found recently is that when I’m reading these super high-tension romances, I just want to get the pages read and often find myself reading over the lulls in the tension too quickly to catch the subtleties. I could obviously have more discipline, but when the heart-pounding is so heart-poundy, I just want to get to the next bit. And then I forget what a joy it is to read a book slowly – or to read a gentle book.

The trend at the moment certainly seems to be for high-octane, fast-paced romances and I do appreciate that, but I read a book recently that made me really reflect on my own reading and on the culture of reading.

I’m sure you’re all wondering what that book was and I could mention it straight away, but it wouldn’t help you at alll, because it hasn’t been translated into English yet, and this is part of my point. It is a crime novel set in South Tyrol (the German-speaking part of Italy). I very very rarely read outside of romance these days (I’m so pushed for time with my reading in general because I read books to provide endorsements for other authors as well as for ‘professional development’ to keep an eye on what’s popular these days, although how much that helps, I don’t know). I picked this book partly because of the setting (I’ve never seen a romance set in South Tyrol – although watch this space haha), but partly randomly out of desperation, because I wanted to properly switch off my professional brain while I was reading. The fact that the book was not only out of my genre, but also in German, meant I could just be a reader for once and not think about a book in terms of the writing of it.

It was a lovely experience to be ‘just’ a reader again. My German is very good, so I was fairly quickly deep in the story, despite the language (I even managed to get the idea with some of the dialect words). I was always looking forward to picking it up again to see what would happen next and because I liked the characters and enjoyed my time with their thoughts. But I didn’t ‘binge’ it. Perhaps the language was slightly too tiring to manage that, but also because I wanted to stay in that world for longer. It caught my imagination. I wasn’t tearing through the pages desperate to know who the killer was (and I must admit I guessed woefully wrong, got completely taken in by the red herring and missed the important clues near the end), I was reading it like a big Aperol Spritz on the beach (or a Veneziano at a mountain restaurant, like the inspector from Naples in the book). I lingered.

It’s perhaps not fashionable to write a slower-paced book these days (and it wasn’t particularly slow-paced. I’m not really sure because I just know I read it more slowly, which was at least partly because of the language). But it did make me think that ‘compulsive reading’ isn’t only a good thing. I know I enjoy books that are more of a gradual blossoming than an explosion of action too (maybe I am an outlier, though, because I find more and more books growing popular because they ‘shock’ the reader).

But I would definitely make a case for quieter books that pull long threads into a slow tapestry of mood, plot and characters, books where you want to appreciate every moment you’re able to spend with the characters. I’m also not talking about literary fiction here. I also think a genre novel can be immensely satisfying, even if it’s not keeping a reader on the edge of their seat for the entire duration (I don’t need that kind of stress in my life LOL).

This might be an unpopular opinion. Shock and awe seem to be the direction of the blockbuster books these days. I’m also reluctant to recommend any books at the end of this post, just in case someone reads it and thinks these books are not page-turners (the books that spring to mind absolutely are page-turners and I enjoyed them much more than some books I read in an afternoon, but I they were gentle enough to savour).

Perhaps part of the problem is that you do need to read these sorts of books in a different way. If you skim the quieter, lower-tension sections, you’ll miss the whole point of the book. You have to take the time to appreciate the characters and the gradual development of the plot. And in a world where thousands of books are published every day, a slow, careful book has a natural disadvantage.

But what do you think? Do you inhale books in a single afternoon? Do you draw them out? Do you like a rollercoaster ride of a book, or do you also enjoy a gentle winding road of a book?

In case you’ve got this far and you’re still wondering what book it was that I read to cause this musing, it was ‘Der Tote am Gletscher’ by Lenz Koppelstätter (‘The Body on the Glacier’). I have a weird crush on police commissioner Grauner now. He was a very quiet, gentle character, with a few flaws (that is a topic for another day – I love flawed characters, but romance readers famously don’t), but I found him very compelling anyway.