Current Events > Started reading a book for the first time in years today

(+) Yeah! (+)

I got absolutely shitfaced on wine yesterday, and I left my phone in someone's car. Woke up and had to go to work today, and I didn't have my phone to listen to or read, so I grabbed a book off the shelf at work and started reading. It was a slow day, so I actually got a lot of reading in - over the course of the day, I read like 57 pages of a 90 page story.

I've been thinking about reading more for the last couple of months. I want to improve my own writing, but all I ever read in my spare time is GameFAQs, Discord and fanfiction. By reading more books, I'm hoping I'll get a better idea on how to write prose. I think I'm pretty decent, but I could really stand to improve - and if I get good enough and end up enjoying the process all the more, I might be able to write some original stuff and maybe get paid for it. It's all a self indulgent pipe dream, of course, but even if nothing ever comes of this, at least I'll be reading more - there's nothing to lose.

The story I read was in a Reader's Digest collection. It's a Nicholas Sparks story called A Walk To Remember, and it's not super great. I've enjoyed it more as it's gone along, but the main character is kind of an ass and the plot's kinda generic. But it's interesting to see how a story like that can draw you in - initially I was like "for fuck's sake, Landon, stop going off on these stupid fucking tangents" because he'll be trying to set the scene, then he'll fall into some tangent, then he'll excuse himself and keep going, only to fall right into a whole new, unrelated tangent. That was annoying. But as much as that bugged me to begin with, a lot of it came up later in unexpected ways. The set-up was kinda garbage, but the payoff was pretty decent.

And to its credit, it's a much more enjoyable, coherent read than this fantasy novel I picked up called Blood Trillium. I read the first chapter of that and it read like raw asshole. Might be because it's the second of a trilogy, but the book throws out these stupid nonsense fantasy words as soon as it starts and the whole second half of the first chapter is a story told by an elf in first-person. Including digressions and everything, kind of like A Walk To Remember.

If today's reading has taught me anything, it's that I'm closer to the dialogue standards of your average novel than I was expecting. I need to cut down on the "'dialogue happens here' he said as he brushed a strand of hair out of his face" stuff, because most of my written conversations have characters just doing actions like that over and over again with every new sentence - it'd be like watching two people talk who keep gesticulating wildly at each other. But I'm doing okay in the dialogue department.

My next read should be something in third-person. I've got some doorstopper romance book on my shelf, as well as this book called The Bride Laid Bare that I think might just be 500 pages of smut. The latter one is in first person though, so I might have to go with the former.

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The smut sounds good. Imo, erotic stories are some of the best porn

I recently reread Good Omens. Might sound familiar, Amazon recently did a series with David Tennant. Damn good watch and an even better read.

Otherwise I've been reading a lot of comics recently. Kingdom Come is great and I recently got a special edition of DKR as a birthday present. So. Good!
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yoooo, nice. Yeah, Good Omens was all over Tumblr when it aired. I hear the source material is good, in that Neil Gaiman-y way. Dunno if it's my bag, but I can appreciate what I know about it.

I saved the smut book from a Salvation Army book bin when I was on a work placement. The thing would get to the point of overflowing because next to no-one bought books, so I'd have to load up a trolley and throw a bunch of them in the trash every couple of months. That was the worst part of the job tbh, aside from working at a Salvos - I've heard some bad stuff about them.

Legit, the book is uncredited (later editions were credited, this one just has "Anonymous" listed as the author), and of the three pages I flipped to, the main character was getting railed on each and every one. Three random pages, three descriptive and vulgar passages about getting fucked. I either got the best odds in the world and stumbled onto the only parts of the book that got naughty out of sheer chance, or this thing is a smut factory. Either way, there was no way I was going to destroy it.

Comics are neato, but I don't think I have the patience for them. I like reading about the different comic events on TV Tropes, and I started watching this Youtube channel called Comic Tropes which has been fun.

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MrMallard posted...

Three random pages, three descriptive and vulgar passages about getting fucked. I either got the best odds in the world and stumbled onto the only parts of the book that got naughty out of sheer chance, or this thing is a smut factory. Either way, there was no way I was going to destroy it.

niiiiiice

MrMallard posted...

Comics are neato, but I don't think I have the patience for them.

I don't buy the weekly editions, just collections of a whole storyline. English language comics tend to be expensive here >_>
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