Booking Through Thursday: The End

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This week’s question:

You’ve just reached the end of a book . . . what do you do now? Savor and muse over the book? Dive right into the next one? Go take the dog for a walk, the kids to the park, before even thinking about the next book you’re going to read? What?

(Obviously, there can be more than one answer, here–a book with a cliff-hanger is going to engender different reactions than a serene, stand-alone, but you get the idea!)

It all depends.

Some books require quiet time afterwards. I remember feeling utterly destroyed after reading House of Leaves, and it took me a bit of time to figure out what it was that I had just read. I knew that the book was something special, but I needed some uncluttered alone time to figure out why. I felt the same way after I read Photographing Fairies, and I was quite sad to find out that its author never wrote another novel. In cases like that, I tend to put off reading the next book on the queue for a little while, instead concentrating on less strenuous activities, like SpongeBob Squarepants marathons or cooking bread pudding.

The level of busyness in my non-reading life has a lot to do with it, too. Two weeks ago, I finished reading Wrack and Ruin, which I acquired courtesy of LibraryThing’s Early Reviewer Program. It was a great book, and it certainly inspired a lot of thought and emotion, but I still can’t bring myself to write a review for it. Though I would love nothing more than to prioritize my books and my reading above anything else, the truth is that my reading queue is the first thing to fall by the wayside when things get too hectic. So, more often than not, what dictates what I do after finishing a book is not the quality of or the emotions inspired by the book itself, but the million other things I have to juggle in my every day life.

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