Karen Sandler

Tag: reading

  • Old School Reading: On Paper

    As a Kindle devotee, I’ve been reading e-books nearly exclusively since December 2010 when my husband gave me one for my birthday. Even before that I was happily using the Kindle app on my little iPod because it was just so easy to zip through a book in e-format. I did discover that electronic is not so great for non-fiction–there’s no easy way to flip back and forth to and from the endnotes–but it’s a dream for fiction.

    By happenstance, I’m in the middle of reading a non-e-book, the second book in a row in paper format. In the case of the first one, I was at a fabulous indy bookstore, The Avid Reader, in Davis, California. I mentioned to the bookseller that I was a local author, and I told her about Tankborn. She promised to get at least one copy in stock. It seemed only right that I buy a book at the store, and when I spotted a trade paperback edition of Jasper Fforde’s One of Our Thursdays is Missing, I snapped it up. If you haven’t read any of Jasper Fforde’s delightful Thursday Next books, you must check them out. Start with The Eyre Affair. It’s a wacky fantasy that draws heavily on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

    After finishing One of Our Thursdays is Missing, I moved on to a hardcover edition of Mette Ivie Harrison’s YA fantasy The Princess and the Hound. I met Mette at the Life, the Universe and Everything conference in Orem, Utah. We shared a fabulous Thai dinner one night, then she was kind enough to drive me to the airport to catch my flight home. Along the way to SLC airport, we agreed to exchange author’s copies of our books. She sent me The Princess and the Hound and I sent her a couple of my backlist romance novels. I’m loving Mette’s book with its very unique take on magic. It’s a very hard to put down story. And isn’t that a gorgeous cover?

    What I’m rediscovering about reading hardcopy is that it has some definite advantages over the electronic versions. First, it’s far easier to see where I am in the book (somehow, the percentage on the Kindle doesn’t cue me quite the same way). I think I emotionally pace myself as I read, thinking differently about the story at, say, the half-way point than I do three-quarters through. It’s easy to flip through to find how many pages to the end of the chapter so I can decide whether to keep reading or to turn out the light and go to sleep. It’s a piece of cake to turn back to some previous part of the book to recall who a character was or to refresh my memory if it’s been a day since I last read the book.

    There are downsides to paper too. A paper book is heavier than the Kindle, particularly the hardcover. I like to be able to hold a book in one hand (sometimes I’m doing something with the other, like eat lunch) and that’s easier with the Kindle. It’s easier to turn the pages on the Kindle. And if I set the Kindle down, it might timeout, but it will keep my place. A paper book will often close itself if I have to set it down quickly. If I haven’t stuffed a bookmark in there, I have to search for where I left off.

    So I suspect I’ll still be reading the bulk of my books on my Kindle. But I’ve realized I enjoy reading the occasional paper book. Particularly when it’s autographed by the author, like Mette’s, or full of clever illustrations, like Jasper Fforde’s. It’s lovely to have the option though, to go either way.

    What do you think? Die-hard reader of books on paper? Or are you loving using an e-reader? Drop me a comment and let me know.

  • Why God Made Editors

    I’m not writing this to kiss up to my editor. Really. I’m writing it in response to that “wall-banger” book (which shall remain nameless) that I abandoned last night.

    You know what a wall-banger is. It’s that book in which you invest some time reading. You try to plow your way through it and maybe even read it all if you’re one of those people who feels compelled to finish every book you pick up. But at some point in that process, the lack of writing craft or the poorly structured plot or weak characterization or crappy ending gets to be too much and you fling that book against the wall in disgust.

    Of course, since the book in question was on my Kindle, I didn’t literally fling it against the wall. Those suckers are pretty sturdy, but I’d hate to see my Kindle meet its end due to my fit of pique.

    And I should mention that there are readers out there who considered at least one of my books a wall-banger (they didn’t like how one of my characters met his end). So I’m not guiltless in enraging readers.

    But the thing is, the wall-banger I gave up on last night was actually a pretty good book. That is, it had some great world-building, a fascinating premise and interesting characters.  About the first third of the book kept me riveted.

    But then a peculiar literary affectation started jumping out at me more and more. The author seemed to be enchanted with gerunds in lieu of verbs. Many, many sentences started with a gerund, and never got around to becoming a complete sentence by use of a verb. Going on and on. Running one sentence after another in this way. Driving the reader a little bit crazy. Creating an irritating narrative.

    You get the picture. If the author had used this literary device only occasionally, interspersing it with sentences with nice, active verbs as he did in the first third or so, he wouldn’t have gotten on my last nerve. As it was, I started editing his prose in my mind as I read. I’m pretty quick with mental editing, having written a fair number of books, but it does get tedious. It didn’t help that about the time this gerunding was going into hyperdrive, the plot slowed to a crawl.

    And now back to why God made editors. I took a peek at who published the book after I’d abandoned it. Best I can tell, it was self-published. This is not a commentary on self-publishing, because I do see that as a perfectly respectable way to get your book into the hands of a reader.

    But I firmly believe that without an independent professional editor laying eyes on that manuscript, it’s going to have problems. This book’s author might have had writer friends give him feedback (I’m guessing yes, because much of what I read was quite well-written). But I’m guessing a professional, working editor never worked on the book.

    If she had (and I say she because all but two of my editors have been women), she would have noticed the author’s overuse of gerunds. She would have suggested he be more sparing in his use of that method of laying out the narrative. She would have cut back on those long, overwritten paragraphs that caused my eyes to glaze over, would have showed him ways he could cut to the chase and allow the gem that lay beneath his verbosity to come to the fore and sparkle.

    The book seems to be doing quite well on Amazon, if its ranking is anything to go on. So maybe I’m just full of it in my opinion that an editor can make a difference. Maybe the quality of your prose doesn’t matter as long as you sell books. But I doubt I’ll ever pick up another book by this author. And I doubt I’d recommend it to anyone.

  • Hopelessly Devoted to E

    I was e-published pretty early in the game (my SF romance, Eternity, came out as an e-book in 1998). But I was definitely not an early adopter of reading e-books. I always felt pretty guilty about that. Here I was, an e-published author, on the cutting edge of publishing, and I read nothing but paper books.

    The thing was, back then the options for reading e-books were not the greatest. There was reading on your computer (ugh), or using one of the clunky e-readers that were available. I did try it for a while, first using an eBookman, then a Palm Pilot. But with both of them, the experience was awkward and uncomfortable. I always went running back to my paper books.

    Then I bought an iPod, which I grew to love. And downloaded the Kindle app. I started reading books on that tiny screen and realized I really liked it. The device was nice and small, the backlit screen allowed me to read in bed after my husband turned off the lights to go to sleep. I could buy and download a new book from the comfort of my own home (or anywhere else with wireless) and receive it immediately.

    I was hooked. A few months after I started reading on the iPod, I realized I wanted a bigger screen and a better display for reading books. My birthday was coming up (which means it was just about a year ago), so a Kindle went on my B-day list. I’m pretty cheap, even when someone else is buying my gift, so I went for the lower priced non-3g model.

    And oh, what a wondrous time it’s been this past year. I’ve always been a voracious reader, but I’ve probably upped my reading by 15 or 20 percent. I seem to fly through books now, even with the slightly more awkward button click instead of touch screen technology. I love-love-love my Kindle, only putting it down this last year to read maybe 2 or 3 print books.

    What’s kind of funny about this is that I still read a “dead tree” newspaper. Yeah, I read many articles on the web, but I enjoy the tabloid format of an actual Sacramento Bee. Until we have a holographic substitute that I can “hold” and is as big as a current day newspaper, I’m sticking to paper for my morning read.

    But my pleasure reading–all e, all the time. I love you, Kindle.