{"id":74,"date":"2007-06-21T18:24:45","date_gmt":"2007-06-21T23:24:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/practice-makes-perfect-try-and-try-again-dont-judge-a-book.html"},"modified":"2007-06-21T18:24:45","modified_gmt":"2007-06-21T23:24:45","slug":"practice-makes-perfect-try-and-try-again-dont-judge-a-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/practice-makes-perfect-try-and-try-again-dont-judge-a-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Practice Makes Perfect, Try and Try (Again), Don&#039;t Judge a Book&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I just started a book by a new author (by &quot;new&quot; I mean that she is new&nbsp;to me&#8230; she&#8217;s been writing books for years), and try as I might, I simply cannot stay awake while reading her book. Of course, as I have said before, I feel like I absolutely have to start reading an author at the beginning of his\/her series, and I know that an author&#8217;s first book is not always a true sign of what the author is capable of, but since I have to begin somewhere, it&#8217;s the place where I am going to decide whether or not to continue with that author&#8230;&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I find that most of my reading is done at the end of the day&#8230; while I am relaxing. It&#8217;s the time of the day that I consider truly mine&#8230; not to be shared with anyone else&#8230; doing something I love to do&#8230; by myself&#8230;. getting immersed in a good, for the most part, cozy mystery.<\/p>\n<p>But, after spending several nights trying to like&nbsp;&quot;my new author,&quot; I finally decided that&nbsp;although I know&nbsp;she has many devoted readers out there, I just could not join their ranks. &nbsp;After trying to read her book for well over a week, and seeing that I was only approaching page fifty, I had to make a choice&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Devout cozy mystery readers know&nbsp;about &quot;the choice&quot; time&#8230; It&#8217;s the time when you have to decide if you really want to invest more time with this author, or if it&#8217;s time to call it a day and move on.&nbsp;Throughout life we are taught to persevere&#8230; &quot;practice makes perfect&quot; and &quot;try and try, again&quot; are little sayings that have been ingrained in our brains since we were little. Maybe that is why it is so difficult to move a much-anticipated author from our TBR list (To-Be-Read) to our Tried-and-Didn&#8217;t-Like list. <\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know if it is the let-down of finding that a much anticipated author just doesn&#8217;t cut it for you or if it&#8217;s&nbsp;the price of books these days,&nbsp; I just know that I agonize over not finishing a book. But, I have so many favorite authors who have so many books out there for me to read AND ENJOY, that I just don&#8217;t feel like I want to waste time forcing myself to finish a book. Now that I don&#8217;t belong to any mystery reading groups, I feel like I don&#8217;t &quot;have to finish&quot; a book simply for the sake of finishing it. If I finish a book, it&#8217;s because I am enjoying it and want to&#8230;. It&#8217;s not like I&#8217;m in school and there is a test that is going to measure how much of the book I actually read. And, if I don&#8217;t like a given author who many other people do like, that just means that variety truly is the spice of life&#8230;. or is that the one about a silver lining in wolf&#8217;s clothes&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just started a book by a new author (by &quot;new&quot; I mean that she is new&nbsp;to me&#8230; she&#8217;s been writing books for years), and try as I might, I simply cannot stay awake while reading her book. Of course, as I have said before, I feel like I absolutely have to start reading an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-74","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-books","7":"entry","8":"override"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pI0sr-1c","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}