Rev Stan's other stuff

Postcard from my life: Week 18 or the last book I'll ever read...

Probably. It's out with the old and in with the new. Anthony Horowitz's Scorpia Rising, the last in the Alex Rider series may be the last novel I read in mulched tree format as I am now the proud owner of a Kindle.

I've been thinking of getting one for a while. Mainly because I like to have a book with me to read when I'm out and about as I never know when I might have 10 minutes spare. And, when I'm out and about I tend to do quite a bit of walking and bulky books just do my back/shoulder in. (There is also the storage issue when you have a one bed flat).

For a while the size of the book has been a big factor in whether I'll read it or not. Hardbacks were definitely out. But with the Kindle it is always the same size. It is slim and light and I can carry more than one book with me, 3,500 in fact (and a dictionary).

It has taken a little getting used to. I hadn't realised that I'd got into the habit of starting to lift the page to turn it as I was still finishing the last sentence or two and of course you can't do that on the Kindle, you start pressing the arrow to move on and bang you are there so there was a bit of back and forth in the beginning.

Guilty reading pleasure

OK it's not a soppy chick-lit or Mills and Boon or anything of that sort but actually teen fiction. And not even girls teen fiction but boys teen fiction.
Don't get me wrong, I love reading adult's literature but nothing has absorbed me as much as books like Harry Potter and Twilight.
And now I've discovered the Alex Rider series by Anthony Horowitz. For goodness sake it's about a 14-year-old boy who gets blackmailed into become a spy for MI6 and goes on improbable adventures!!!
A film of the first one - Stormbreaker - was made which I also loved and is what sort of started all this, that and listening to an interview with Horowitz on a Radio 4 book programme recently.

But I love them. Can't wait to sit and read them, love them. Snatching five minutes reading whenever I can love them. No adult books ever have quite the same effect.
Is it wrong? Why do I feel guilty to be reading them?
I've quickly gone through the first three books and am forcing myself to reading something aimed at my age before I buy any more - there are eight in the series.
The only explanation I can offer is that it is pure escapism. Easy escapism at the end of a busy day. Alex is always getting captured by baddies and facing certain death only to somehow escape, which mirrors the sort of adventures I played over in my head when I was young teen.
But I still feel guilty.

 

 

 

QotD: Would You Rather... (Career)

Would you rather be a great musician, athlete, scientist, artist, politician or writer?

I'd love to be a great writer and write the sort of books I love to read and can only dream of being competent, dedicated and talented enough to write.

I'd like to be a writer like Ian McEwan or Sarah Waters or Stephen Fry (when he was still writing novels).

Latest good read: Fingersmith

Fingersmith

Sarah Waters

Haven't read a really, really good book in a long while. You know, one you make special time to read, one that has you thinking about the characters when you aren't reading it and one that makes your jaw drop with an unexpected twist.
Well Fingersmith by Sarah Waters ticks all those boxes. Without giving too much away, it is about a girl who is brought up in a house of thieves in Victorian south London but who goes to work as a lady's maid in the country as part of a plot to extort the lady's inheritance.
Waters' writing reminds me a little of Dickens, one of my favourite authors, with twists and turns in the plot and larger than life characters.
It's the first book of hers that I've read and will definitely read the rest.