How to Indulge Yourself

Do you think indulging yourself, as a reader, means heading back to your favourites?

Yep, sometimes it’s nice to ground yourself.  Re-read old favourites, and return to favoured genres.   For me, that’s an easy fall back because my answer to the age-old question, “What do you like to read?” is “Everything!”  Well almost.

I over-indulged in mysteries when I was young, and these days, I’m way ahead of the author on the primary whodunit question.  I’m one of those insufferable people who had the movie Saw figured out twenty minutes into the movie.  The clues were all there, you just had to put them together.

So mysteries rarely hold any excitement for me.  But there’s little else I won’t read…or at least start to read, anyway.  But it’s been a long while since I read for comfort.  Not pleasure, but comfort.  Comfort reading is, as I mentioned, going back to your favourites on your keeper shelf.

There’s a danger in that. If you keep dipping into your favourites, they’ll eventually become too worn and familiar and fail to keep you entertained any more.  (See Novels Taste Better Frozen, for more on this.)

I rarely read for comfort because of this danger.  I also do so much reading to keep up with my industry and my craft that I plain don’t have time to read for either comfort or pleasure.

So I have decided to return to my roots and read the fun stuff for a while.  A few weeks of pure indulgence.  That actually means, for me, a few weeks of exploring unknown authors in my favoured genres and hoping they grab me.  You get through a lot of books that way, but when you do hit a story that has bite, oh, it’s so much fun.  You fall in love with reading again, and remember why you got hooked on stories in the first place.

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First appeared on Stories Rule, October 2007

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Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2009. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission, or without this copyright notice attached.