So Many Books, So Little Time

Like many of you, I belong to Goodreads and it tells me how many books I’ve read this year. Thirty-eight so far. Really? When did I have time?

My Kindle is overloaded. My i-Pad and phone have the Kindle App as well. If a battery dies on one device, I can pick up where I left off on another one.

I like going to the local bookstore, too. Captain Mark and I are both readers and while I’ll choose two or three paperbacks, he’ll have a bag full. He reads faster than I do and he re-reads the same books. He says he might have missed something the first time, so he reads them all again.

I don’t do that. Too many books and too little time to finish them.

How did I get so fond of books? One of my earliest memories is going to the library with my grandmother. The library was in an old mud-brick building (called an adobe) in San Juan Capistrano, California. The building was tiny, but it was right downtown not a block from the old Spanish Mission that has the same name as the town. Decades later I was on a committee to build a new library in the same town, one that is a landmark there today.

As an author, I can tell you there has never been a better time to be a reader. Amazon alone has about eight million books for sale on line. Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million seem to be healthy, and there has been a resurgence in small bookstores, especially those in towns too small for chain stores.

Libraries are still around for those who aren’t regular book buyers and ebooks are cheap and many are offered free. The best news? Even with cell phones and on-line series and television shows, books for young adults are having a Renaissance. Every publisher has a YA division and most are hard cover books.

My reading tastes are pretty eclectic. Some of my favorite authors are Nora Roberts and Jayne Ann Krentz for romantic suspense; Mary Balogh, Mary Jo Putney, Julia Quinn, and Sherry Thomas for historicals; and Elin Hilderbrand, Dorothea Benton Frank, and Karen White for women’s fiction. As for contemporary? Too many favorites to list.

Because Scandal’s Child, my book that releases Wednesday, is technically an historical with women’s fiction and gothic overtones (laughing here…what have I done?), my current nightstand book is The Girl with the Make Believe Husband by Julia Quinn. It is set during the American Revolution (from the British point of view).

What are you reading?

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