Mood Reading

There's yet another bookseller online. No Quest is now up and available for Kobo. Plus, it looks like we're getting close to having the print version ready to go (as usual, there was an Amazon oopsie to work out first).

Thanks for all the book recommendations. I now have several on hold at the library to be sent to my branch for me to pick up, and there are a few more that are already on my shelves that I need to take another look at. Saturday is supposed to be cool and rainy, and if I keep up my usual writing pace I should finish my rough draft on Friday, so I think Saturday is going to be a reading binge day. I'm so close to being well that a good, restful day may be just what the doctor ordered. I even made it through choir rehearsal last night. I wasn't up to my usual standards, but I was there and I did sing.

Much of the time, I can read just about anything I'm inclined to like, and there are some books I can read and enjoy at any time. There are other times I'm more prone to one kind of thing over another, and there are books I'm more likely to enjoy in particular circumstances. And then there are times when only certain things will do, or books I can only read in certain situations. Sometimes, it's circumstances -- there's a difference between what I want to read on a bright summer day and what I want to read on a cold, gray winter day, or there are books that I have to immerse myself in that don't work when my life is limiting me to a chapter or two before I go to bed at night. Sometimes it's a mood, and that's a lot harder to figure out.

I can generally tell if I'm not getting into a book and it's more about the circumstances than about the book itself. A book may strike me as something I need to come back to on a rainy day or on a quiet weekend when I have time to read it mostly in one sitting. Knowing that I'm just in the wrong mood is a lot more difficult because I often don't even know what the mood is. I know I'm in a weird, particular reading mood when I find myself staring at my bookshelves, at the library shelves or at the pages of my "books I need to read" notebook, and nothing's really striking my fancy. It helps if I read something, it turns out to be just what I wanted, and then I know I want to find more like that, but then often that turns out to be hard to find.

For instance, trying to find traditional but not epic fantasy. There's no category for that on Amazon. There's epic fantasy and historical fantasy. You can check through stuff like magic and wizards, but these days that tends to be more full of urban fantasy (though, hey, Much Ado About Magic comes pretty high on that list, even though it doesn't show up with that category as a bestseller on the book's page). If I look through historical fantasy, there's little that strikes me as "traditional," though I've been writing down titles for when I'm in the mood for fantasy that's not of the quasi-medieval variety. Most of the things that seem to fit are things I've already read. But now I am starting to get a yen to read Stardust again (that would be a good example of the kind of thing I'm looking for).

I'll have to see how Goodreads works for getting something that specific, but then I've found some of their categorizing to be questionable. For instance, when I was going through their suggestions and marking books I'd read to get more suggestions, the first time my own books were suggested to me was in the "mystery" category. But I generally find that the best source for book recommendations is my readers. If people like my books, there's a chance that I might like other books they like.

Now I just have to figure out which of the books I'm getting from the library or have on my shelves I want to read first.