Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

The Lure of a Good Book

I’ll do just about anything for it. Ignore housework, bribe the kids with television, put off the next load of laundry (or five), order take-out instead of cook, go to bed way too late, and in some cases, let my writing go untouched as I immerse myself in a riveting story weaved by a fantastic storyteller.

Falling into a good story with strong characters I can sympathize with, action that keeps me glued to the pages, sexual tension that makes me squirm in my seat for that first kiss, are all reasons I feel in love with reading and writing.

Good books are addictive and no addiction comes without a price. Not every book I pick up grabs me and doesn’t let go, and sometimes I have to go through quite a few average or wall-banger reads before I find another story that snares my attention from page one. To find those good books I often have to take risks, ones that don’t always pay off, but every now and then, that new-to-me author turns out to have written the next book I can’t get enough of. And then all the waiting in between seems more than worth it.

Sometimes finishing a really good book makes me hesitate to move onto the next one in my TBR pile. I want to linger over those characters a little longer, wishing the story could keep going, partly because I assume the next book I read won’t be as good. But if I’m really lucky, a good book will make me want to dive straight into the next one in hopes I’ll find another story that resonates with me. One that lets me slip away where I get to ride along with a detective solving a case, see a woman transported into the past, feel the prickle on the back of the hero’s neck when I know he’s being watched. One that lets me laugh out loud at the tipsy heroine who can’t handle her liquor, feel my heart break when lovers are torn apart, smile so wide my cheeks hurt at the snappy one-liners that endear me even to the secondary characters.

A good book can turn a bad day around like nothing else. It gives me something to look forward to when I’ve been rushing around all morning. It settles me down after a stupid disagreement about something I can’t even remember what it was about ten minutes after the fact. And a good story can make me stop and look at my husband just a little longer when he comes through the door in the evening and the kids are talking over each other to tell him about their day. A look just long enough that he notices and we have that moment where we both remember that connection between us, the one that sometimes gets buried in the day-to-day stuff, is still there and just as strong as the day we met.

While a good book helps me leave the pressures of regular life behind, it also inspires me. As an author, it makes me pay attention to the flow of the words on the page, makes me look deeper for what it is that makes me flip those pages faster and faster. But most of all, a good book makes me want to get back to that work-in-progress I walked away from when my characters weren’t cooperating and the action seemed flat. I know the authors of those good books I love didn’t nail every detail in their first draft, maybe not even by their tenth. But they did, eventually.

A good book drives me to improve my own writing, to tweak and strengthen in hope that something I’ve written is going to be someone else’s good book.