coalescent | Reading Survey

hddod has a post about what she's read this year, and asks about reading habits. I posted my answers there, but I think I'll repeat them here, neatened up slightly, and I'd be interested to see answers for other people on my friendslist.

So, how much do you read?

Probably at least an hour every weekday, and ideally I'd like at least one solid morning or afternoon at the weekend. If I go too long without a proper dose of story, I can get cranky.

What have you been reading this year?

So far, this, which seems to work out to about 50 books and a whole bunch of short fiction magazines.

(The asterisks are there to mark anything I thought notable at the time; this does not provide particularly fine discrimination. It's more likely that un-asterisked titles are disappointing in some way than it is that asterisked titles are excellent. Square brackets indicate that I've started a book but not yet finished it.)

How do you find time to read?

I've got into the habit of reading when I get home - I find it's a good buffer between work-think and home-think and jobs like, say, having to cook. I also find that if I try to read after about 10pm then I fail miserably, so I have to get my pages in early. I don't often let myself get caught up in a book during the week, because there are usually other things I want to do with the evening.

Train journeys are good reading time. That's one reason why I like them, even though they can be more expensive than driving (and also a reason why I think that being able to commute by train wouldn't be such a terrible thing). Some people I know read at work, in breaks or at lunchtime, but I've never really got into that; I tried for a while to read a short story at lunch every day, but I kept getting distracted by conversations.

Given two hours a night for a week, how many books would you get through?

That depends on the length of the book! I might get through Quicksilver in that time, or two normal-length books. Generally I read about 60 pages an hour. Reading short fiction is usually slower, because you have to restart your imagination every twenty pages to keep up. I don't say that that's a bad thing, mind ...

EDIT: And for comparison, here are my answers for film and TV.

So, how much do you watch?

Not nearly as much as I read. I go to the cinema probably three times a month, and I rarely watch broadcast TV. If I do, it's strictly of the appointment variety - something looks interesting, and I tune in. I almost never just switch the TV on because it's there. Most of the time I live in TivoWorld, except without the benefit of having a Tivo.

What have you been watching this year?

Having said the above, my equivalent list still looks quite healthy. I'm not sure how I've managed that. On tv, there's certainly not much this autumn that I'm looking foward to; next spring brings Carnivale and Global Frequency, but that's about it. In the cinema, there are a few more things - The Village, Sky Captain, The Incredibles - but still not that many. Mind you, I suspect this is partly because I'm just not as aware of film release dates as I am of book publication dates, or even as I am of TV schedules.

How do you find time to watch?

It's sometimes hard - there are other things, like reading and seeing people, that I prioritise over TV. For cinema, cost is a factor; even if there were a lot of films I wanted to see, I couldn't see them all, particularly since the people I most want to see them with are in London.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

So, how much do you read?
In termtime I used to read nothing for weeks on end. Now, it's probably a couple of hours a day depending on whether I'm really gripped by something.

What have you been reading this year?
Books? I don't have any subs to fiction magazines, so I tend to read novels almost exculsively unless I get lent some collection of short fiction.

I'm now going to try and list all the books I've read this year.
Alastair Reynolds, Absolution Gap
Dan Simmons, Ilium
Stephen Baxter, Time, Space, Origin, and Coalescent
Michall Marshall Smith, Spares
Robert Sawyer, Frameshift
Ted Chiang, Stories of Your Life and Others
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents
JK Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire/Order of the Phoenix
Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe's Gold/Company
Maeve Binchy, The Copper Beech/Scarlet Feather/Evening Class
Charlie Stross, The Atrocity Archives
John Wyndham, The Midwich Cuckoos
PF Hamilton, Pandora's Star
Richard Morgan, Altered Carbon
Phillip Pullman, Northern Lights Trilogy
Steph Swainston, The Year of Our War
Theodore Sturgeon, More than Human
Matt Beaumont, e
Eric Brown, New York Nights
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
Christopher Priest, The Separation
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (non-fiction)
Simon Reeve, One Day in September (nf)
John Sulston, The Common Thread (nf)
Rose Collins, Colonel Barker's Monstrous Regiment (nf)
Tom Mangold, Plague Wars (nf)
Douglas Frantz, Celebration USA (nf)
Michael Moore, Adventures in a TV Nation (nf)

It's not a huge list, but most of this has been read since mid-June.

How do you find time to read?
I have not a lot else to do at the moment, really. So I fill my days with reading, internet faffing, a bit of TV, and lots of sleep. For interviews I ended up spending about 10 hours a week on trains, and that got thorugh a lot, plus I took a pile on holiday and read them on the beach.

Later this afternoon I am going to investigate the feasibility of reading books while on the exercise bike. I think doing this on the treadmill would spell disaster.

Given two hours a night for a week, how many books would you get through?
A lot. I think I'm reading at about 60 - 80 pages an hour at the moment, depending on the style of the book and whether I've read it before, which seems to speed me up.

So that's about 700 pages a week, so one or two mid-sized books, or about half of a Peter F Hamilton novel.

Ooh, that's a bit of a monster comment. I also realised I've read Ender's Game this year, too.

How was _Ender's Game_?

I liked it a lot. Some of the twists were fairly predictable, but overall it's a good read, and not bloated out to a greater length than it needs to be. Some of the parts with Ender's siblings as political pundits were somewhat boring, though.

I've heard the sequels are less good and get steadily worse, so I'm keeping away from those. And from Orson Scott Card's own political views.

Nope. They get better. Well, most of the way. Speaker for the Dead is better, though very different, and the series peaks somewhere in the middle of the third book Xenocide. The ending of that is a little contrived but then things go *rapidly* downhill in Children of the Mind.

I have recently finished Ender's saga, and I found the sequel _Speaker for the Dead_ quite a good read. The style is different from _EG_, we meet another sentient species and the plot is compelling enough. The last two books, _Xenocide_ and _Children of the Mind_, tie up the loose ends.

At around the end of Speaker, there comes a dialogue about ramen species, what it means and how the borders can be extended. I still find it hard to believe that Card wrote that bit, given his current political philosophy.

Maeve Binchy?

And I really must try to read non-fiction. But I always think, well, I could read that, or I could read this new novel ...

Writer of fat books that women take on holiday. Gossipy stories about Irish people doing stuff, basically. I'm using them as quick and reasy reads while my brain recovers enough to read books that take effort and thinking to read.

She wrote Circle of Friends, if you've seen the film.

I know who she is! My mum reads Maeve Binchy. I was just surprised that you did. :-p

My God! Liz isn't as cool as we thought!

I didn't know how well you knew non SF&F authors :p

All the Maeve Binchy in this house belongs to my mum, anyway. I just end up reading them when I want a change.

That's almost as bad as admitting to reading Mills & Boon because there was nothing else left to read. ;)

This is a bad time to admit to reading Mills and Boon, isn't it?

(In my defense, I was young and stuck at my grandparent's for the day, and I'd already read my grandad's guide to carp fishing.)

I have written stories to avoid reading M&Bs... And then the cosmic wheel turned, and they were the only kind of fiction I could read through my first pregnancy. Everything else, with real characters and good stories, caused too much emotional upheaval. I read a lot of non-fiction, and I read way too much romance.

I always think non-fiction is a bit like brain sorbet - I find some novels very difficult to get out of my head, which means I have trouble reading the next one; at that point a nice level-headed dose of (usually) history is just what I need...

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