top ten tuesday

I think these are going to fall more on the side of confessions than brags. But you guys can decide.

I don’t like bookstores

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I find bookstores completely chaotic. I’m a library girl. Give me book stacks organized by the Dewey Decimal System and I’m happy. I’m not a person who wants to go and browse for hours in a bookstore. Probably a big part of that of that is related to the next point.

I don’t like owning physical copies of books

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Having a big home library isn’t a life goal any more. I have 2 small bookshelves in an upstairs bedroom. When they get full, I purge. I also have some books that I am keeping forever on a different bookshelf downstairs but that is 2 shelves worth. I really don’t like the clutter of having a lot of books around. I’m not a person who is going to be buying special editions of my favorite books.

I almost never read paper books anymore

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I have a really hard time focusing on reading paper books. They are just too inconvenient. They don’t hold themselves. They don’t have their own light source. I’m entirely ebooks and audio at this book. When I do need to get a paper book from the library because it isn’t available electronically, odds are I’m not going to finish it. I even have a clear dry bag for my iPad so I can read with it in my hot tub. The only place I don’t read with it is on beach days. It’s too hot and sandy. Then I have to find a paper book to read.

I don’t care about meeting authors

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I like listening to an author lecture but I don’t have any interest in standing in line to meet them or have them sign a book. I talked about this when I went to the National Book Festival in August. My friend waited in line for hours for a signing that never happened and I got to see lots of talks. It isn’t just authors. I have no interest in meeting any humans, I guess. No actors or other famous people. It would be fine if we met under normal circumstances but standing in line to meet someone at a fan event creeps me out.

I don’t follow book social media anymore

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Once I left Twitter I really stopped following a lot of social media. I still like Mastodon but I only look at it about once a week. I don’t use Instagram or TikTok. I don’t follow book accounts on YouTube. I don’t listen to book podcasts. I only follower the bloggers. You guys are my people!

I never read the cool books

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Whenever the Goodreads Choice nominees come out, I look at the categories where I’ve read loads of books that year. I have very rarely ever read any of the nominated books. Usually I have never even heard of some of them. From this I’ve learned that I am:

  1. old and out of touch
  2. not spending enough time in bookstores and/or social media

I’m ok with that. I end up reading a lot of books I find on Kindle Unlimited or on my library’s Libby app. These tend to not have a lot of marketing budget. I also end up reading a lot backlist. I also find weird niche nonfiction. I’m listening to a book about grizzly bears right now.