#BookBlogWriMo Day 2: How You Read

Alright Day 2: How You Read - Paperback? Hardcover? Ereader? Smartphone? Bookmarks, note taking in the margins, or highlighting? Tell us some of your reading rituals!

As I said yesterday I have always been a reader. Before e-books I didn't really care what format my book was in. Hardback, paperback, whatever I will read it. I usually had paperbacks just because they are smaller and easier to take everywhere with me and I had a greater access to them. I got a lot of books from used book stores and library books sales and the library and most of those books happened to be paperback. 

When e-books started to be a thing and the Kindle came out I thought eh. Why would you want to read an e-book when you could read a paper book? A few years ago my friend got an original Kindle I believe and she let me borrow it one night to try reading on it. I was curious to see how it would be, and I hated it. It was terrible. The contrast wasn't great enough, I kept trying to increase the brightness even though it does not have a light, it just didn't work for me. I felt like I needed a light shining directly on it to be able to read without a lot of eye strain. No go for me. Hated hated hated it so no e-books for me. I will just stick with my paper books and read them. 

Then as I said yesterday I moved to another country, Germany. My German is not up to the level that I can read books that I currently read. I can read kids books in German, and I am working on becoming fluent, but I can't just not read. They do have a small English language section at the library, but it is not that big. There are some English language books stores, but I am cheap and don't have a lot of money to spend on all the books I want to read. Hard copy books are just more expensive than e-books. So I broke down and started reading e-books on my ipad. 

Well that lead to me reading almost nothing but e-books now. Sure if I still lived in the states I would get more paper books from the library and sales and such, but here it is harder to find cheap paper books I can read. Also shorty after moving over here I found some of those sites that list daily free or on sale e-books. I signed up for a couple of email lists of free/cheap books and found there were a lot that sounded good. I quickly started downloading books and now have way too many to ever be able to read them all. I have found a lot of amazing authors from those free books. Authors that I now buy their next books as soon as they come out, all because I got the first book for free. It is harder to do that with hard copy books. The whole e-book world with all the self published authors and such just opened up to me and now it is hard to go back. We also travel a lot and it is a lot easier to take my e-reader with me with hundreds of books than it is to bring tons of books. Easier, lighter, I am now a convert to the e-books. Sure I will always love my paper books, but e-books are so convenient. I can mark a place and then quickly pull up and see what it is I marked. Sure you can do that with paper books, but it takes more time and you have to put something in the pages to mark them and it just was always too much work when I was reading and I don't like the way it looks. I know that is stupid, but true. It took too much time and would break me from my story with paper books. So e-books it is for me. I used to hate them and didn't understand the appeal, but now I love them. I still have a few things I don't like about e-books, like I cannot lend it to more than one person, not at a time just ever, like I would with a paper book, or for more than 2 weeks, but it is not that big of a deal and I still like them. 

So when I started with the e-books I started reading on my ipad. Now the ipad is not the best for reading books on in my opinion. Some people don't seem to mind, but for me there is too much glare, the brightness doesn't go down far enough (especially when in a dark room - I don't like bright screens and keep them on the lowest possible brightness setting unless I am in sunlight), it is harder to read in the sunlight, just a lot of eye strain. Since I was reading so much I started to weigh on me. So last year when the newer Kindle Paperwhite came out I said okay, I will try this out. I purchased one and I absolutely love it. It is so much nicer to read on than the ipad. You can read in sunlight, in dark rooms (the brightness goes way down!), anywhere. No glare, no eye strain, it is perfect. I love it and can't imagine going back to something else now. 

So now about my reading habits? Well I wouldn't say that I really have many. I don't bookmark things. With hard copy books I am definitely a page corner turner downer. I hate real bookmarks. Not sure why, but they have always bugged me. If it is a library book I would use a small scrap of paper to mark my place, but no actual bookmark. I am weird that way. I don't usually highlight passages either. It is easy to do on my Kindle, but I don't often come across something that in the moment I feel the need to highlight. There are some authors, like Penny Reid, that are exceptions to this. Penny's stories have so many amazing moments that her books just get highlighted all over the place. So many funny, touching, sweet, crazy, whatever moments that I know I will want to go back and re-read later. If I find something really humorous in a book I will highlight it. On the flip side I also highlight things in books I hate. Passages that just make no sense or are so poorly written or make me angry or whatever. 

Also, while reading I don't usually take notes. Typing on the Kindle is a no go, it is terrible, but I usually just don't have thoughts I need to get down until I finish the book. Sometimes once I finish I jot down some quick thoughts I have about the book so I will remember when I go to write my review, but more often than not I don't do anything until I write the review. The only time I open up a blog post and start making notes while reading is if a book is making me angry. I have to get out those thoughts so I write them down just so they are out of my head. I never use what I write at times like that in my reviews as they are just super angry not nice rants. That doesn't happen often though. Usually I wait until I am done reading to write notes. 

So there you have it, how I read. This turned into a much longer post than I had thought it would. Hope you have enjoyed reading it and getting to know me a little better.