Reading

I’ve been doing lots of reading of late. I started reading amateur writing on Wattpad and that’s been an interesting experience. Most of the writers seem to be young and much of the material I’ve read has been teen fiction. It’s interesting how I see the same sort of stories here as I do elsewhere. And although the writing is often lacking it’s not much worse than some of the published works in some of the free ebooks I’ve read. The one thing that would improve most of these stories would be some proofreading at the very least. Some of the spelling is really atrocious but I am kind if pleased to see the flow of story ideas even though they are keep to some of the same story lines. Something else I noticed in these stories is that they do a lot of building up and then suddenly the story is finished up quickly, skipping over the rest of the story. I can only imagine these are situations where the writer has lost interest or given up but want to do some sort of completion of the story. Some of the stories are reasonably good so it’s a disappointment when this happens because I feel it ruins what was working out to be a good book. I’ve also been reading at Radish and Inkitt which are similar sort of websites. All have apps to use on IOS so I have all three on my phone and try to check out material every so often.

Although Wattpad and similar are kind of fun, I am also back to getting through many of the books I’ve downloaded on my Kindle. Most of the books I have are freebies but some I have bought. The quality is pretty variable and some of them I finish just to get them out of the way. Others are surprisingly good and I read other works by the writers. So the idea of a free book isn’t so terrible if the quality is there. I also get some of the daily and monthly deals. I’m still reading the second book of the Outlander series but managed to buy a couple further titles at greatly reduced prices in the monthly sale a couple months ago. I also managed to get a couple Robin Hobb titles although I don’t think they are in the Farseer trilogy where I am currently reading the second book.

Another series where I got books on sale is the Paper Magician series. I won’t say it’s great literature but I liked the premise of the first book quite a lot. But it got stuck in the problem of the writer setting it in the early 20th century in England but there are teenaged characters behaving like modern day teens instead. This is an issue I felt the editor should have handled but didn’t. I read the second book, The Glass Magician, and it was much better. But I came to wonder why it was set in that time frame in the end. There was so little to tie it to any time period in my view. I still have one book left in the series and plan to read that soon. The books are fairly short and are generally quick reads.

I’m still fascinated with the teen romance genre. One thing I’ve noted lately is a number of stories in published and amateur situations where the female protagonist comes from some dark background (sometimes it’s the male love interest though) and then one bad thing after another happens to this character. I find this to be a bit of overkill and makes the somewhat unbelievable stories even more so in the end. I really do wonder how much tragedy one person could experience.

Which leads me to Twilight which suffers a bit of this sort of treatment too. While I didn’t love the book, it wasn’t so bad as so many have made out. I mean it was like a bandwagon of Twilight haters. Much like the bandwagon of haters on the rock groups Nickelback and Coldplay. I wasn’t too keen on the ending of the book, mostly because it seemed to be like the end of a chapter and not an actual volume of a series. I am in no hurry to carry on to the next book but probably will read it in the future. I will say it’s kind of good to know a bit more about the series than before.