I used to read a lot of books. That has dropped off in recent years. Now I will pick a book up as I go to bed, read five pages and fall asleep. Too often, the next night I will have to re-read what I read the night before, because my comprehension tends to come and go that close to sleep. I will get nowhere, bore of reading the same thing over and over and ditch the book. I will pick up another one and repeat. As I look at the pile of 15 to 20 discarded books next to the bed I will despair of ever getting back into the flow.
I still read, of course. It is just that the reading is confined to the internet or the occasional newspaper or magazine. And no matter how good the writing might be — more often than not it is not good, especially where the internet is involved — all this does is to train me to read in bite-size pieces. As a consequence I am loaded with ever more superficial and trivial information. Helpful for pub quizzes, but the more the internet teaches me, the dumber I feel.
Further, I find that if I’m not reading sizable tracts of material, I don’t write no good. My vocabulary contracts. I forget how to spell words I used to know how to spell, and I often lose their meaning. My grammar takes a turn for the worse, and my subjects and objects and adverbs and prepositions and such get mushed into an incomprehensible morass, and it is a chore to tease it out into some semblance of clarity. My tenses get crossed. I start sticking punctuation, where it has no place. I hate that.
I must read.
To help me do so, I have created this site as somewhere I can put my thoughts and views on the books I complete. This serves three purposes: it is an incentive to read more books so I have something to write here; it is a good way to get me thinking critically about what I read (something I am all too wont not to do); and it is a very good way of remembering what I have read.
You will probably notice that most of what I put up here will tend to be Science Fiction. Maybe some Fantasy. Likely some Non-Fiction. And occasionally I will branch out into the world of serious Literature.
I grew up on a steady diet of JRR Tolkien, Arthur C Clarke and various children’s authors: Douglas Hill, CS Lewis, Lloyd Alexander, Alan Garner, Robert Westall, Susan Cooper. These authors are all of the science fiction or fantasy sort and, for better or worse, have coloured my tastes appropriately.
