When I was a kid, I could spend literally hours in a book – reading through page after page at a breakneck speed. Less reading, really, and more like absorbing the stories.
But then a smart phone came along and my attention span fell apart. Now, I would have trouble concentrating for a long period of time with the siren song of the interwebs calling from my pocket.
I didn’t like that I had become so easily distracted and resolved to recapture the immersion and speed from my younger days.
And it’s worked, mostly. A cup of tea, a comfortable chair, and a good book with a silenced phone meant I could escape again into some fantastical world again.
Provided it was a good book. With all the books I’ve read over the years, I have a pretty high standard for my reading materials and if I’m going to invest my time – it had better be good and it had better be weird.
(I have also gotten a bit snobbish about the size of books. $23 for a novella? Absurd!)
I was pretty excited when I picked up a new book that had an interesting cover, an interesting title, and a summary that suggested it would be quite weird.
And then… it wasn’t very weird. Things happened to people and people did things, but it was at this strange remove. I was 3/4 of the way through before the first ghost ship showed up, but there was no connection or reason. It simply was. Where was the mythology? Why were these things happening? It just plodded along until at the end when the ghosts animated wax figures from a museum and…saved the day? I guess? I lost the thread somewhere in there.
I read it all the way through – seems courteous – but added it to the Half-Priced books pile when I closed the cover. I didn’t like it, but perhaps someone else will.
I’ve moved on now to a suitably weird and consistently weird (and reasonably priced) new book and I’ve spent much of the weekend sitting outside in the sunshine – with my nose buried in a fantastical tale.
As I should be.