Quote:
Originally Posted by barryem
... And I don't start a book unless I'm pretty sure I'm going to finish it. Now and then I'll get that wrong and I don't hesitate to stop if I get a bad one. But if it's just not what I was in the mood for I'll know that early on and will put it off till I am in the mood. Once I'm into the book I'll finish it unless it's pretty bad and I don't get many that are that bad.
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Quite true for me too, and it is amazing how mood can make all the difference sometimes.
Take my situation with Terry Brooks. I had not read one of his books for about 19 years. The last one I read, was The First King Of Shannara, back in January 2000. I started reading his Isle Witch novel in December last year, and even though I had been hanging out for years to get back to reading his books, I struggled to get into it. One of the reasons I kept putting his books off, was because I was always reading many other somewhat similar fantasies, and I don't like to mix them. I like to have space so as not to risk confusing things, especially as some authors write quite complex stories, with lots of threads and characters to follow.
Anyway, Terry Brooks time had finally come, but it seems I wasn't in the mood. So I threw in a couple of other books meanwhile. A non-fiction book by Martin Clunes about dogs, and J.K. Rowlings 4th Murder Mystery novel. She, like Dan Brown, I tend to read close to purchasing, and I got that book for Xmas. At that time, I must have read a few chapters of the Terry Brooks novel, and I knew I liked it, but just struggled to get momentum with it.
After that divergence, I tried again, and suddenly things started moving, and in the end I really enjoyed Isle Witch (finished it on the 3rd of February), and read the next two in the trilogy quite quickly ... a few days each. I have since read 2 other Terry Brooks trilogies in the Shannara series, and one ebook novella. All read in a reasonable time frame.
Mood I find, is such an important element.