From dog-earing pages to refusing to read a series until the last book is out, I’m pretty sure every bookworm has a list of bad reading habits as long as their arm. Some of these sins are definitely worse than others, but we all commit them. I’m guilty of more than a few of bad habits when it comes to my reading, habits I’m not proud of, but which I also find almost impossible to break. Today, I thought I’d ‘fess up to a few of them. Let me know if you have any of the same habits.
Starting In The Middle Of A Series/Skipping Important Books
Unlike most sensible readers, I presume, who will start a series from the very beginning, if I can’t find the first book then no problem, I’ll just skip it and start with book two. Who needs to understand what happened before, or get the backstories and know character arcs, right? Or if I’ve read books one or two, but can’t find book three, that’s fine, I’ll just go straight on to book four. Book three probably wasn’t all that important, right? Right? The looks I get from people when I admit to this particular writing sin is almost comical. It’s a mix between ‘you did WHAT?’ and ‘you have to be joking’.
Forgetting To Read The Other Half Of The Series
Sometimes I discover an awesome series that’s exciting and gripping and I want to read all the book so badly it almost hurts, but then I can’t find a couple of the books in the library because, horror of horrors, someone else is reading them, and so I put off finishing the series until those books become available. In the meantime, I start reading something else for a while. And then forget to come back. For five years. But I do love the books, I swear! I’ve actually got a post on this blog listing series that I’ve started but never finished if you’d like to see a few casualties of this habit.
Forgetting Every Single Character’s Name
If you were to come to me a week after finishing a book and asked me about the characters, odds are I’d have forgotten every single name, even if I absolutely loved and cherished them and would have died to protect them. Name one of them, and I’m going to be hard pressed to remember even which book you’re talking about. It’s not my fault I have a brain like a leaky sieve that won’t hold onto people’s names. It does get rather awkward when I’m talking to someone while I’m still in the middle of the book and I still can’t remember the character’s names though. I swear I am actually reading it properly. Just, names are not my strong suit, in reading or in writing, alas.
Refusing To Read A Book Because It’s Popular
One surefire way to make sure that I won’t read a book for the next several years at least, is for it to become enormously popular. As soon as a book hits the top of the bestseller list and is surrounded by bookish hype, it drops to the bottom of my TBR list. I think I’m just afraid to read them because they get hyped up so much that if I don’t love it the way everyone else does, I’ll feel guilty, like there’s something wrong with me because I didn’t enjoy it. So I wait until most of the hype has died down and then I can read it without quite so much pressure. Most of these books do end up living up to the hype, but I’m always afraid that they won’t, and I’ll be left trying to pretend that I did like it so that I don’t sound like the spoilsport in the room.
Being Excited About A Book But Never Reading It
If there’s one reading habit I wish I could break more than any of the others it’s that of being super excited to read a book, to the point where I’ll even preorder it so it’ll come sooner, and then never actually reading it. I don’t know why I do this. I know I’m going to love the book. I own the book. I could read it any time I wanted. It’s right there! And yet I don’t. And there’s no good reason for this at all. I’ve done this so many times that I even have a list of these poor books that are languishing on the shelf, waiting for me to get around to reading them. It’s almost embarrassing at this point.
Using Everything But A Bookmark To Keep My Place
Now I own quite a few bookmarks. I have some plain but serviceable ones, like the free ones you get with a Book Depository delivery. I have some fancy ones that my family have given me as presents and souvenirs. I have more bookmarks than I have books on the go at any one time. I can even find most of them on a semi-regular basis, instead of them being lost to all corners of the wind. And yet, whenever I need to keep my place in a book, I will use the nearest object to hand, from a clean tissue, to a business card, to a hairbrush, to my phone, to another book. Anything can be a bookmark if you try hard enough.
Those are just a few of the reading sins I commit more regularly than I’d like. But now it’s your turn. Do you share any of these bad habits? What’s one reading habit you wish you could break?
I’m so glad I’m not the only one who uses tissues as a bookmark, haha! What can I say, they flatten quite nicely! 😉 And I feel you on forgetting characters’ names. It’s impossible for me to pronounce most of them, let alone try and find room in my brain for them! xD (I have no idea how you start in a middle of a series though!! But to each their own. :D) Great post!