Literary Blog Hop June 6-11

It’s been far too many weeks since our last Friday meme. After coming across this week’s Literary Blog Hop question at The Blue Bookcase, we decided to end our dry spell.

Question: What other outside influences affect your reading experience? Do you think these influences enhance or detract from the experience?

Answer: To be honest, there are too many outside influences to list in one blog post. A quick 30 second  brainstorming exercise identified the following: Life experiences, current events, prior author experience, previously viewed movie adaptations, life stage, current emotional state. And as much as we try to safeguard our bookish endeavors, we fail miserably. Below is a sampling of the influences affecting our reading experience.

Audio Books – Our long daily commute necessitates the frequent use of audio books. Narrator quality has a HUGE impact on the overall book experience. Many of our favorite books have only been experienced through a fantastic audio book adaptation (I Capture the Castle, Jane Eyre, and The Time Traveler’s Wife). We wonder if our opinion would have been enhanced or detracted by a traditional read.

Blogosphere hype – As a general rule, this influence only has the power to detract. While hype has inspired us to move a novel up our TBR list, rarely have we encountered a super-hyped book exceeding the hype. A few of these books have met the hype, but we were already expecting that. More times than not, we find disappointment at the end of a super-hyped book. Not because the book was bad, but it just wasn’t as good as what 10,000 other bloggers led us to believe. Obviously, we’re not talking about any of the books you recommended.

Previous reads – In many cases, a previous book can have a profound influence on the current book. Whatever book we read after The Hobbit or Gone with the Wind or The Eyre Affair surely suffered by comparison. We also try to genre hop as much as possible, because too much of the same thing can be a drag. As much as we loved The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy we don’t recommend reading through the trilogy in five parts back to back to back to back to back.

Aggressive TBR list – We’re a bit challenge challenged and we’re secure enough to admit it. The cute little “100+ books in a year” bird likes to sit on our shoulder and motivate us towards our goal. Sometimes this bird can even be a tad bit pushy and encourage us to speed through a novel. Actually, maybe time is more to blame (that bird is pretty cute). If only we had more time then we’d be able to read at a more leisurely pace and reflect more on the plot and characters.

Whew... that’s all we got for today. Let us know what factor influence your bookish endeavors.