Welcome to 2022 and MORE Reading with Kindle Unlimited!

Image by Ri Ya via Pixabay

And here we are, already sighting the end of January in a brand new year. How did that happen?  

Well, there have been issues: health (meh…), slothfulness (definitely). I’ve written a couple of articles for the Medium digital platform since the New Year, but the current Mystery novel, so close to its ending, is still tapping its foot in frustration. Then I was distracted.

Yes, I know, shiny things… tiny minds… But this one I thought I’d share.

I’m an author, which means, by default, I am a reader. Over the years my purchased reads have fallen into two distinct categories: paper for non-fiction – it’s much easier to add Post-It notes to numbered pages than attempt to do the same digitally – and ebooks for fiction, which I can carry around with me and read in bed without my hands cramping or my arms falling off due to the weight. But I’m a slow reader, and I’ve never subscribed to Kindle Unlimited because I don’t read enough to warrant the subscription. Except, today I just did.

The UK Amazon store is offering two trials: two months for free, or three months for 99p. I’ve plumped for the three months. Will I cancel on the subscription date in April? Probably not. Even if I run the paid subscription for a further three months (£7.99 per month) that means I’ll get six months of KU reading for just over £4 a month. I’m from Yorkshire; we think about these things. Besides, I pay more than that a month for the ebooks I purchase.

Will I now splurge on a mass read? Probably not. There are time, concentration, and thinking considerations. What I will do is look at the more expensive novels – on principle I do not buy an ebook with a price tag equating to its hardback. As I’ve said, I’m from Yorkshire. But I don’t mind borrowing them. So why don’t I borrow them free from the local library? Because I only own a Kindle and not a tablet, and municipal libraries in the UK offer ebooks only in ePub format. I am not reading a novel on my laptop sitting at a desk I’ve sat at for most of the day.

I also intend trying out books which come with audio narration. Yes, I’ll need my laptop, but I can lie comfortably on the bed or even do housework jobs. We shall see.

Doubtless many readers will be rolling their eyes at my finally climbing another digital rung, though if you are like me and have been thinking about a KU subscription but not bothered to act, you have until the 31st of January to grab the extended trials, otherwise the usual one-month free kicks in.

Enjoy your reading, no matter how you do it.

Writers need to be Readers

It’s been a quiet Christmastide at Acaster Alcoves: daily walks, some socialising, but lots and lots of  reading.

As far back as I can recall, Christmas reading has meant research reading, but this year it has meant reading for pleasure. Except, for a writer, there is no such thing. 

Can I recognise the author’s misdirections? Can I second-guess the character developments, the denouement? What is causing me to skim, to withdraw from the fiction’s reality? Is the tenor used suitable, the balance of dialogue to narrative, the cut between characters?

Reading, especially for pleasure, is always a teaching tool – if we keep our eyes on the ball and our minds on the bounce. For one, I learned that I prefer reading off the page to listening to a dramatised audiobook. But far, far more important, my reading emphasised that characters are everything.  No amount of celebrity puffs or won awards will enamour me to a novel whose characters are out of step with their professed careers, or refuse to see what is staring them - and the reader - in the face, or have insightful epiphanies on the flimsiest of detail.

Readers are people, so characters had better be people, too. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle accepted this pre-requisite, otherwise he would never have gone to such lengths to have his Sherlock Holmes explain how his deductions were based on fact which Watson, and readers, had failed to notice. Elementary, or what?

A Need to Read for Pleasure

"Reading for pleasure at the age of fifteen is a strong factor in determining future social mobility..." - so starts an article by Jonathan Douglas, Director of the Nationl Literary Trust in a recent edition of the Telegraph Weekend.

The bottom line is that those who read for pleasure, rather than due to the goad of education, are nurturing an inherent human inquisitiveness, a willingness to learn, that will be carried throughout their lives and spill over into aspects of their work environment - hence the social mobility angle.

I agree with this. Feeding an engagement with an abstract world pushes back barriers, opens up horizons.

I meet such readers in bookshops each time I support a signing. Usually they are wide-eyed and dumb-struck by being faced with a writer of novels who actually speaks to them. Despite my not writing for their age group, I ask their opinions on story ideas; ask if they, themselves, write stories. Usually it is the parents who answer, because the children are ten or eleven or twelve. And I talk to them now because I can almost guarantee that by the age of fifteen they won't be reading for pleasure at all, especially the boys.

Point to hormones if you like, point to computer games and peer pressure, but I point to school, the academic need not only to tick boxes but tick boxes dictated by academia for the good of the child.

In the UK we move our children from primary to secondary education at eleven years old, where tales of adventure and enthusiasm are suffocated beneath worthier texts which must be read. In my day that meant Dickens, Austen and Hughes - at eleven, twelve and thirteen - 19th century novelists writing for a contemporary adult audience, not even children of their day.

Did my son fare better? Not much. What could I say to books thrown across the room accompanied by '...explain how a rocket can land next to a house and an old grandad can climb aboard and travel to the moon...' when he had never known a time without manned space flight. 

My family has no third generation going through today's schooling, but from reading Jonathan Douglas' article there seems to be the same sort of hand-wringing over literacy there was in my day. Perhaps my four minute conversation with a young voracious reader in a bookshop is a mere drop in the ocean, but oceans fill due to individual drops of rain. Sprinkle a raindrop today. In fact, sprinkle several. They're needed, if the comments beneath the article are anything to go by.