Even as the world is slowly but steadily disintegrating around us, we turn to our personal cope strategies just to survive each day. Me, I turn to books, try to lose myself in that world of make-believe. But of late, I seem to have lost all desire to plough through books that do not hold, or quickly lose, my attention and interest.<\/p>\n
There are people who pick up a book, skim through the blurbs, study the jacket illustration, glance through the first few pages, then decide the book is\/isn\u2019t for them, and either buy it or pass. <\/p>\n
I envy that lot. Because I usually pick a read after much deliberation, less influenced by the blurbs than the synopsis, at times intrigued by the cover but ultimately falling back on what I know of the author. Then I start the read. Sometimes, by Chapter Two I know it\u2019s a turkey but I hang on with grim determination till I reach the last page, hoping to mine what seem pretty well-hidden gems. <\/p>\n
Long years of intent reading (and reviewing) have shown me that sometimes one gets to the meat of the matter only after a quarter of the book is read. While I still firmly hold onto that creed when I read for review, I find I am fast losing my patience with books I read for pleasure. Unwittingly, I\u2019m applying the formerly famous \u2018Mari Kondo method\u2019: no more plodding through these joyless objects. If it doesn\u2019t work for me after I\u2019m 40 pages down, that\u2019s it, I\u2019m done, and I put it aside, to donate to the neighbourhood library or exchange it for a discount at my favourite bookstore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Even as the world is slowly but steadily disintegrating around us, we turn to our personal cope strategies…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76165,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[64,63,457,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-76164","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76164\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76165"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}