Am I the only person who suffers from reader's block?
There I am, reading away happily for a while, when wham! Along comes the wrong book at the wrong time (or is it the right book at the wrong time?) and suddenly I'm stuck. Reader's block. I can't get to the end of the book, but neither can I bring myself to let go of it.
My latest reader's block has been caused by Eamon Duffy's Saints and Sinners: a History of the Popes. I got maybe a quarter of the way through and ground to a halt. I don't want to give up. Duffy is a top notch historian and the book is a subject that interests me ... but it is a fairly dense read. A big, big subject, and small print, which doesn't help. I have to be in the right mood to pick it up, and mostly I'm not. And there are an awful lot of pages to go. But neither can I quite bring myself to put it aside. It means that for the last month I have read little other than knitting books.
Right, Bookworm. Move on! You have permission to stop reading that book. Or, rather, to stop not reading it.
In a similar vein, I have been short on ideas for blog posts lately (is it a Lenten thing?), but since Easter I'm bubbling over with ideas. Whatever writer's block I had seems to have vanished. Lots to write about ... Little Cherub snippets, interesting conversations going on elsewhere, plans, thoughts and just plain trivia. Now I just need to make time to do the writing!
Friday, March 28, 2008
Reader's Block
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
2 comments:
Uggh. I am in such a reader's block right now, it isn't even funny. Earlier this week I tried a book that I thought was about finding Jane Austen in England and ended up being about Evangelical Girl moons over Oblivious Boy while touring sites Jane once may have lived. I threw it back into the return bin at the library unfinished.
Now I'm slogging through a rewrite of the story of Elaine that is thoroughly uninspired. Song of the Sparrow is boring. Can you tell me how in the world you can take an amazing story like that and make it a yawner??? That takes talent of some sort, I guess!
Oh yeah, that's happened to me, though I've never really thought about it as such. I love your term for it.
I also sometimes get into a funk where every book that I pick up is wrong and I can't get past the first page of anything. Another sort of reader's block.
Post a Comment