Reader’s Life – Sometimes it’s not the book

Have you ever read a book and disliked it so much that you gave it a bad rating? Not because it was poorly written, but because the characters would, simply, get on your nerves for one reason or another, and when you close the book, you think, “What the heck have I just read?”

Then, you pick it up again a few months later, or sometimes more, read it again, and boom, it clicks and you realise that you have misjudged the whole story.

I don’t know how to better call it than “I wasn’t due”.

It happens. Sometimes, it’s not the book’s fault. Sometimes, I end up in another place in my life where the book I picked to read was just not correct for my mood.

For instance, I remember reading Wild Orchids, by Jude Deveraux, six years ago. I liked it, yes, but not overmuch. Worse (for me): I picked it up again last year and realised that I didn’t remember a single thing about it! That, in itself, is very telling when it comes to me, because I remember every book I read, at least in part. In this case, I remembered a big nothing.

So I checked when I bought it, and when I read it. It was bang not long after my dad had passed away. I definitely was not in a good place at that time, fighting a major depression. This explains that, in this case, because now I can tell the story really fast and just writing about it now brings all those images in my mind: the roses, the devil, the rocks, the photography and the material, everything, vividly and in colours. Because when I read it again, I was in a better place, mentally.

The same thing is happening to me right now, as I am starting to binge read the whole of K.F. Breene’s Demigods of San Francisco. I read the first book, Sin & Chocolate, last January, just a couple of days after finishing Tallulah’s Temptation. I remember the book clearly, and I remember how I felt reading it, and how I didn’t like Lexi at all, finding her super immature and not liking that she let her teen wards walk all over her. Visibly, I was impatient then.

How do I know? Because I’m reading it again, now, and I love it! Mind you, Lexi is still immature, but I can see a little more inside why she acts like she does, too.

So yes, it was not the book’s fault at all. I was just not in a good place to read it back then. I wasn’t due.

I don’t think it has anything to do with the book I read just before, either. It likely had to do with my frame of mind at the moment, having just finished a couple of weeks (the week before the Christmas holidays and the week after them) in a super great class, and I was not receiving calls for work, so my mind was just not happy and not in the mood to deal with Lexi.

As you see: not the book’s fault.

Where am I going with that long-winded post? Simply there: it’s good to give a book or a series a second chance, especially if it’s well written. I knew what I was getting into, the first time, with that book. After all, I had binged the whole Darkness series during the Holidays and I was familiar with K.F. Breene’s style and liked it. But my mind wasn’t into it then.

Visibly, it is, now. So I’m glad I gave this series another chance at another moment.