Booking Through Thursday–Do Over

hosted by Booking Through Thursday

This week’s question:

Sally asks: Have you ever bought a book, started reading it and then realized you have already read it? If so, how far did you get? (Can you tell this happened to me for the first time ever this week!?!) And–did you keep reading??

When I first started reading a lot, I went to my local library. This was before goodreads, so I had no organized way of keeping track of books I read but didn’t own. My husband used to go out to sea so I’d leave the library every 2 weeks with a stack of 14 books. I was reading a lot of popular authors in contemporary romance, romantic suspense, or crime fiction, such as James Patterson, Sandra Brown, and Nicholas Sparks.

What I didn’t realize then (and I definitely realize it now) is that so many of those books have similar plots. I’m not trying to bash the genre or the authors, but it’s something I noticed. These are the kinds of authors where if you read one, you can pretty much guess what the others will be like. This trend made it that much harder to distinguish books I read from books I didn’t. I would get home, start reading, and realize that I read this one before. Sometimes, I’d keep reading and realize that no, I hadn’t read it before, it was just eerily similar to another book by the same author.

After I started to get bored with those genres and annoyed at this happening all the time, I changed up my reading interests and started to work on classics. Since I’ve stopped checking out stacks of books at the library, expanded my genres, and started using goodreads, this hasn’t happened to me. With goodreads alone, I can keep track of books I’ve read before.