I started reading The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. It’s one of those books I overlooked along the way. Maybe this was because I saw the movie many years ago. Sometimes when I see a movie based on a book I avoid the book, especially if I really loved the movie. I don’t want one to be spoiled by the other.
I’ve only read one other book by Mordecai Richler – Solomon Gursky was Here, and I thought that one was most excellent. I started reading Barney’s Version at one point but it didn’t grab me and I didn’t feel like investing more time in it at that time.
I confess there are lots of books I perhaps should have read but skipped for no real reasons, and a much smaller number of books abandoned along the way. Reading a novel requires the commitment of time, compared to painting for instance. When I look at a painting I see the whole business at once and I can decide in a pica-second if I want to spend more time with it. But with a book, you don’t get to see the whole picture without investing the time. Of course then there are the books which hold you in and make you feel like you don’t ever want to leave.
Do you read old-school books or do you read them on an electronic device or both? I’m in the both category. I’d say 2/3 or maybe even 3/4 of the books I read are in hard-copy book form, but I do read some on an i-pad and I’m ok with that. the ipad is especially great for reading at night – excellent for camping and reading in a tent for instance. You loose the tangible qualities of the book object though, and I still like those. I like the smell of the paper and the ink. I like to flip through, read about the author on the back page and so on. I imagine I’ll get over that at some point. When I am reading something on the ipad it seems just fine. If anything the ipad is a little heavy. A smaller notebook or an e-reader might be better for reading. A phone is decidedly too small.
Are there books most people you know have read which you skipped along the way?
27th Street 
I’d say I’m about the same in terms of the proportion of digital to ‘real’ books I read. If I’m impatient to read something or I see a bargain on Kindle I like the fact that I can download it and start reading in an instant. But I also spend hours of my life in bookstores, especially second-hand stores and I’ll often snap up a hard copy of a book that I’ve enjoyed on screen if the opportunity arises.
There are howling gaps in my reading – everyone else seems to have read Harry Potter, The Cloud Atlas, The Life of Pi and Wuthering Heights but I have a whole load of stuff I want to read before I get to them … if I ever get to them.
I’ve ignored the Harry Potter books….I have a crazy theory that the author is really an actress and the books are sketched out and focus grouped in boardrooms. I haven’t read The Clud Atlas either.
I love your Harry Potter theory. I’m a bit suspicious of anything people seem to be hysterical about – so that goes for Harry Potter! It seems to be about a young wizard who goes to wizard school, graduates to an adept and ends up confronting an ancient evil and having many adventures along the way. When I was a teen I read Ursula Le-Guin’s ‘Earthsea’ trilogy, which is about a young wizard who goes to wizard school, graduates to an adept and ends up confronting an ancient evil and having many adventures along the way – and I can’t see how this could possibly be improved upon 🙂 Plus I’ve read all the Jennings books and all the Molesworth books and I went to a boarding school so that element doesn’t feel new to me either (end of rant).
Consider the total number of Harry Potter pages written and the time frame. Could it be written by one person? Consider this. I grew up on the Hardy Boys novels. I thought they were written by a guy named Franklin W. Dixon. I thought this because it said so on the cover of every book. Mr. Dixon even wrote the Hardy Boys Detective Manual. Impressive stuff. Then one day – I was still a boy – I discovered that there were different books with the same titles. It appeared they were being updated and the stories changed over time. I wonder how many versions of each book existed? Those books were written by a bunch of ghost-writers for peanuts, under contract to a publishing company. With Harry Potter, there appears to be a real writer. She has a suitably romantic story. There are pictures of her. She does interviews. Any reasonable person would agree she must exist and must have written those books. Why am I suspicious? The whole thing just seems to good to be true. Is J.K. Rowling really Franklin W. Dixon? Is she the Monkees? She hasn’t got a pop record, a sex tape or a perfume line yet (at least I don’t think so…let me know if I’m wrong), and that adds cred for sure. Still. I’m suspicious. I would be very surprised indeed if there were no focus groups involved in the whole enterprise.
I didn’t know that about the Hardy Boys. But it doesn’t surprise me. Hmmm … this has me wondering. J.K. Rowling tried to secretly release a novel for grown ups a while back, too – but it was ‘leaked’ that this new book was really by J.K. Rowling. Brilliant marketing ploy?
I am strictly an old school page turner. But perhaps it’s simply because I have been too lazy to switch technologies when the old one works just fine for me.