Fake Charity Nerd Girl

I realized recently that at some point I associated “reading books” with “work/productive,” to the point where I will now only read books that I feel like I “should” read, either novels that are generally considered to have literary value or nonfiction books that seem like they will have useful/interesting information. The result of this is that I don’t read that many books, like on the order of 20 a year.

My reading habits in childhood were totally different from this. As a kid, I read constantly and paid no attention to the “value” of the books I was reading. I didn’t watch much TV, just because I preferred reading. 

I was thinking about this when I was reading Cursed Child, realizing

1. even though it was pretty bad, I still felt very engaged/in a flow state, much more so than when watching pretty much any TV or reading tumblr/twitter/other internet stuff
   
2. I felt this way all the time when I was a kid
3. I should read bad books more often and make this more of a default leisure activity

My first experiment in this was reading Amy Snow, which I picked up in an airport bookstore because it had a picture of a girl in a Victorian dress on the cover.

Good points:

• set in 19th century England
  
• various secrets slowly uncovered throughout the book
• easy to read and kept me turning pages–I definitely got that flow state I was looking for

Bad points:

• bad prose
  
• this distracted me enough that I had trouble enjoying it until I stopped reading every individual word and just tried to get the gist of every sentence
• boring, one-dimensional characters
• annoying projection of 21st century morality onto 19th century setting

I think one problem is that I’ve developed more taste in books since I was young. But it seems like it should be possible to find books that are easy to read and optimized for reading pleasure rather than literary value, but are still good. I feel like a large fraction of the books I read as a kid fell into this category, but I’m not sure what the equivalent books for adults are.

@princess-stargirl said: Neil Gaiman maybe?Amusingly I think his best written work is actually “The Graveyard Book” which is theoretically for children.

@dataandphilosophy said: You might like Daughter of Smoke and Bone.

@wirehead-wannabe said: Romance novels? Airport thrillers?

Thanks for the suggestions! It’s interesting that only one person actually suggested books intended for adults–maybe I should just read more kids’ and YA books.