#T5W: Bookish Things I’ve Changed My Mind About

Top Five Wednesday is a book meme that Lainey started and I discovered through the lovely Samantha‘s videos. If you’re interested you can join the goodreads group to get the topics for each week.

This week’s topic:

May 1st: Bookish Things I’ve Changed My Mind About
— This can cover any bookish topic you want: tropes, characters, TBRs, genres, anything!

1. Audiobooks

This is probably the biggest change in my reading life. It’s not that I thought audiobooks weren’t valid or bad or anything, I just thought they wouldn’t be for me and I wouldn’t be able to focus on them. Now I always have one audiobook on my currently-reading shelf and I can’t do without them. (Psst, you should read my audiobook guide!)

2. Reading only one book at the time

I used to be someone who could only read one book and wouldn’t start another one until I was done with that one. That’s still somewhat true if we look at the genres of books (I won’t have two contemporaries on my CR shelf, or two high fantasy, etc), but I will generally have a few books that I’m reading at different paces and usually in different formats (audio/ebooks, rarely physical).

3. Writing 

I used to just read whatever sounded good and in a way I still do, but I’m much more aware of how much I like the writing style of the author I’m reading, and sometimes it can make or break my enjoyment of a book. I’m not even talking about the actual prose but more about how the writer seems to treat their readers, if that makes sense? It’ll obviously depend on the genre and age target of the book, but I hate feeling like the author doesn’t trust me to not pick up on clues (especially when it comes to what the characters are feeling, etc) and feeds me redundant information.

4. Contemporary genre

I’m not sure this counts because I’ve always read contemporary, but when I started reading in English I started with YA fantasy and for a while (like…two years??) that’s all I would read. It’s not that I hated contemporaries, I just only wanted to read fantasy! That obviously changed almost to a point where I could barely read any fantasy because it takes me more time and focus, but thankfully audiobooks are helping with that so now I would say I read a healthy amount of both genres.

5. Rating

I’m someone who gives out four and five stars very easily. Looking back at some of the five-star reads I’ve had over the years, I can’t say that they really all deserved such a high rating, especially since I can barely even remember what some of them were about. So I’m trying to always think before giving five stars, “Will this book still be relevant to me in a month? Will I remember it? Has it changed something in me?” Generally speaking I still have a hard time deciding whether to rate purely on enjoyment or on quality, because the two are sometimes very different and I can say that objectively a book is 5-stars-good but I didn’t enjoy it because of personal taste. I see people switching to 10-stars-ratings but I wouldn’t know what that would change for me. So this is not a topic I’ve exactly changed my mind about, but I’m somewhat always working on rating more critically than I did before.

Have you changed your mind about something book-related? What would your past self say if they saw you now?