Recovering From a Great Read

The often insightful Book Riot shared an article yesterday suggesting that the best cure for a Great Read hangover is a switch to a different genre. They suggest that if your mind was blown by Black Swan Green (and if it hasn't been, it will be), you should switch to a history or a memoir- anything but fiction.

And never once has been that my experience.

The better the book, the more I want more books like it. This feeling gets me reading 3 or 4 books by the same author in a single year. In fact, when I look back at the last year, the only gaps in my reading happened when I was in the midst of a rut: by bad luck, I read One Bullet Away, World Made by Hand, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks in succession. And one book's flaws fed my reading of the next one until I didn't even want to write the reviews, let alone read another book.


Part of the problem is that, even after years of trying, I'm not very good at setting aside a book. I know people who sort their books into two piles: finished and didn't finish. In the last year, I've only not finished two books that I made it more than 50 pages into, and one of those is still on my nightstand, waiting for me to come back to it.

And if it's one of the really terrible books, that dread can infect all the rest of my reading.