How Long Do You Take?

Maili’s post about readers being gamblers got me thinking about how much longer I take in bookshops now than I used to do.

I used to go into the stores, zero in on my auto-buy authors, then browse until something caught my eye. I’d usually end up buying six or seven books, and there was always one book that had my blood pumping in anticipation.

This whole process used to take twenty minutes, tops.

Those were the good old days. As time marches on, and as I read more dross, I find that I’m taking longer to select books, and making fewer purchases.

I was in Borders the other day, and I was in there for over an hour and a half. I left with exactly two books, which were both reissues of Nora Roberts’s MacKade Brothers series. I wanted to see if they were as good as when I’d read them over ten years ago.

When I left the shop, I felt very frustrated at not having picked a book that made me want to rush home and read it immediately.

I felt cheated because that rush of anticipation wasn’t there, after all, I’d already read the books that I did buy.

I used to gamble a lot more, in terms of the books I used buy, but these days because there’s so much crap out there, I’m less willing to spend my hard earned pennies on books by authors I’ve never heard of. Sad aint it?

So, how long does it take you to buy a book these days? Are you an in and outer, or are you one of those annoying people like me who spends two hours browsing and ends up buying sweet FA?

By the way, I took a book back to the shop, for the very first time the other day. Surprisingly, it was a Linda Howard book. Almost Forever has to be the worst Howard book that I’ve ever read. Fucking annoying heroine, an arseholic hero who should have been drowned at birth, or neutured, and a storyline with more holes in it than OJ Simpson’s account of why he ran from the cops. Big. Effing. Sigh.