Musings | Randomness

My wife is an avid reader. She reads more than I do… if you can believe that.

Look, I’m a writer. I spend time writing, sometimes (most times) more time than I do reading.

Anyway. My wife reads–I think–like two or three books a week. I’m guessing here. She guesses she read 100+ books in 2014. That’s a lot.

When she told me how much she read I then asked her, “Where did you get all the books?” You see, I usually grab books for her. She’ll kill me for letting this loose into the world but, here it is… She hates making decisions. Choosing a restaurant to eat at… there is usually a long pause followed by a shrug. “You choose,” she’ll respond. So I usually pick out books for her. She’ll read about 50 pages, decide if she likes the book, then either toss the book and pick up the next–if she can’t get into the story–or she’ll continue to read.

At least, I used to pick out her books, until earlier this year.

Around May or June of 2014, my wife stopped asking for books. Okay. I thought maybe she needed a break. She’d been reading a lot the first half of the year and all that reading might have burned her out. Shit happens. Eat too much ham and you’ll be hammed-out. Except for me, I love ham… That’s another story.

I was wrong. About my wife’s reading… not ham.

To my surprise, she’d been picking out books at random.

Not a big deal, yeah. A lot of people pick up books at random. They look at the cover, decide if the design strikes them as interesting, and will walk away with a new adventure to strike out on, a new romance to fuel the fires of the heart. Some people will read the back cover summary after being dazzled by the cover then decide. Again, not a big deal.

To me, what’s interesting about my wife’s pickings is this: The books she’d been picking were self-published books. The free novels on Amazon.

When I asked her how she choose the books–were her choices as random as cover attraction or was she looking for something specific in the plot summary–she answered with, “I read the summary. The story sounded interesting.”

“Did you know the book was written by a self-published author?”

No pause. “No. The story sounded interesting so I read the book.”

She proceeded to look at me like I was stupid or at least hard of hearing. Why else would I read something, dummy?

My point here: big publisher or self published, it doesn’t matter to my wife. All she wants is a good read. And a good read doesn’t always come from the big houses. She continues to scour the free books on Amazon looking for new stuff to read.

This gives me hope. Hope for 2015, the New Year. My wife gives me hope. As she always does.

Story. Always story.

Welcome to 2015. Happy New Year, everyone!