It’s been a while since I blogged about a book and there’s been two reasons for that.
The first is I’ve been unbelievably busy. Usually I spend at least an hour in the evening reading to unwind no matter how much work I have.
To say I haven’t been reading would be wrong, and here’s the second reason I haven’t blogged and a question for all you bookworms.
I have started about 7 or 8 books since the start of the new year, and I’ve given up on all of them. I never give up with less than half the book read, I have this thing about giving it a chance, but if it hasn’t hooked me by half way through its gone.
There have been various reasons; the story was not good and was going nowhere, the story starts off great then meanders into boring mundane nothingness, the author hasn’t done their research and keep making annoying basic mistakes.
An example of the later is a book I started that was set in the current day. The Police Officers kept referring to the forensic teams as SOCO’s. To my knowledge there haven’t been any SOCO’s for at least ten years, they are now FSI, or CSI, or Forensic Support. The same author had a Detective Superintendent as one of the main characters. His team kept referring to him as the DS, I’m sure he would have been chuffed with the demotion to Detective Sergeant. Everyone I know refers to any Superintendent as the “Super”. The worst part of this though is that it was a really good story. I just couldn’t get past the silly errors
So have I just had a bad run, am I just being picky because there are so many good books out there. Or am I having some version of what writers call “writers block”. Have I got “readers block”
Some people have asked why I don’t tell people about the books I don’t enjoy. Well I have some simple rules for my blogs
I never put anything in them which would be classed as a spoiler.
I try not to comment on anything in the story after the halfway point just in case.
I never pull authors up on technicalities.
If I don’t like a story it doesn’t mean nobody else will so I don’t blog about books I don’t like.
There may be an exception to the last rule. I am on a great site called net galley. They ask for negatives as well as positives, and there’s a facility for me to talk directly to the publishers and authors so I can explain my thoughts. So if you see any of my posts on that site, the negatives are there because they sent me a book and asked for honest feedback.
So that’s why I haven’t blogged since Christmas. The good news is work has steadied out and I am back to reading a bit at night.
nigeladamsbookworm 