Have you ever noticed that you read in cycles? I have; I’ve found that I tend to get entrenched with an author at times but most of the time it with genres. While I like to say I read anything and everything, I know this is not true. I do find it interesting to look over my reading history and see just how it progresses.
I’ve said it before and most people already know that I only started reading in the middle of 2009 and while it was a slow start I gradually got better and better at reading that now I’m aiming for 100 books a year. While I would like to talk about reading challenges sometime in the future, for now I want to look at my reading cycle. I call it a cycle because I know that eventually I will go back to these genres and immerse myself with them again and again.
While I often just read on a whim, when I do an overall look at my reading habits the cycle looks like this;
- Classics – My reading started with Frankenstein and I read a lot of classics as a way to catch up on the book I’ve missed out on. At the same time I was also trying to catch up on the Dexter series by Jeff Lindsey.
- 1001 Books to Read Before You Die – when I discovered this list of books, I set out to read books from this list as a good way to try out genres and styles with the knowledge that the books must be good because they made the 1001 list.
- Sci-Fi – I’m not sure why I moved onto Sci-Fi, but there were so many books that looked interesting in this genre that it felt like the natural progression.
- Mystery – I have a love for the macabre and crime that it wasn’t much of a surprise that I begin reading a lot of books in this genre.
- Hard-Boiled/Noir – I finally found the style and genre in the mystery/crime genre that I like the most. Hard-Boiled and Noir will always have a special place in my heart. I love the era and the style of these novels.
- YA – I started trying out YA because of this blog post about What is Wrong with Dark YA Novels and during the time I found my favourite YA author John Green, which meant I needed to read all of his novels (still have one to read) plus other novels that are supposedly similar to his writing style.
- Literary Fiction – I often wonder if this was a result of my book blog or just because I wanted to read something with a little more literary merit after reading so much YA. But now it feels like I’m reading so many literary novels.
I don’t know where my reading will go from here but feel free to make a prediction. I’m happy to let my reading take me where ever it wants to go. I’m happy with where it has taken me so far. I would love to know if other people have reading cycles and what they are.
I definitely read in cycles, and I often find that I unwittingly pick up a book that fits very nicely with the one I’ve read just before it–I can’t help but wonder to what degree this is (subliminally) intentional. I had a sci-fi reading cycle in high school/uni, then a classics cycle when I started listening to public domain audiobooks. Now I’m definitely on a YA/middle grade cycle, largely in part because that’s the genre I write in.
I think it is subliminal. I look back at my cycles and I was surprised with some of them