Books, Books, Books

I’m behind on my writing goal and behind on my work at work, but I still spent my morning reading a romance book that’s like the 13th in one of my favorite “trash romance” series. It’s so ridiculous, honestly. I did update my monthly report like I said I would, so that was good, and I’ve been helping the patrons who’ve come in too. It’s not like I haven’t been working. It’s just that I could be working on my personal word count goal or maybe on the reading goals for NetGalley so that I can write my reviews so that I can up my word count and get closer to my goal of having at least an 80% review rate. However, the “Hard Hit” series by Charity Parkerson is a series I am 10000000% addicted to, and the new one came out a few days ago, and I just honestly couldn’t--COULD NOT resist. It is barely 100 pages so it really didn’t take me long to read and I enjoyed it so very, very much. I’m honestly thinking about reading it again. 

 

And it’s super difficult to read any of the books from NetGalley on my work time because the Kindle Cloud Reader doesn’t work for books that I sent to my archive as “documents.” I’d have to download and install the Kindle for PC and then send the document to the computer’s library. And I don’t like saving anything like that to my work computers. I don’t really want to leave that behind on a computer for my own personal reasons but also because the books from NetGalley are intended to be for my use only as they are advanced copies, and I don’t have my own computer here--we all trade and switch constantly. I’d have to continually register and deregister the work computers to access my account which is a mess and something I could easily forget to do. It just makes me sad to know I have time for reading right now, but I can’t read the books I’ve been granted early access to. Not to mention the fanfiction, occasional free books from the “Gay Romance Readers Club,” and whatnot that I’ve sent to my Kindle Archive over time as well. 

 

I have a lot of things I’d like to read that are documents like that. I’ve spent quite a few years building my Kindle library. At least I do have access to my Kindle Unlimited account. I know it sounds crazy, but even with the 2,798 books that I own that I haven’t read yet (or that I own and would like to read again), it’s often the Kindle Unlimited books I like to read. I don’t know if a Kindle Unlimited account is worth it to other people, but I spend a lot of time reading the books that are available through that service. I know I’ve talked about it before, but a lot of those queer romance stories I love so much are available through the Unlimited program and not available through my library or whatever. I mean a lot of the books available through the program are $1 - $2, but a ton of Bridget Essex books (who I love madly) are available through the Unlimited subscription, and a lot of her books run $5 - $9. Most of them are actually about $8 if you buy the Kindle Edition. I struggle to pay more than $4 - $5 for a book any more, honestly. 

 

It’s not that I don’t get it. People pour their hearts, blood, soul, time, energy, sanity, sleep, and a number of other things into books. I’ve written enough short fanfiction and short stories to have an idea of the pain that writing and editing can be and the torture that you can end up going through for it. People deserve to make money off of their hard work and passion. The thing is, I spend too much money. I don’t get illegal copies of books. I absolutely won’t do that (anymore… there was a brief period where I did, sadly, but it wasn’t long, and it wasn’t much and anything that I loved I did buy a copy of eventually). But I have to use libraries, subscriptions, and sales as much as possible because I spend ridiculous amounts of money on books as it is.