I suppose I’m being a bad influence when a friend confesses that she stayed up way too late binge-reading a series, and is now half-dead… and my immediate reaction is to celebrate she found something good enough to binge, and suggest she take the day off to rest, recover, and read some more.
The laundry will always be there waiting. The good book is on hand now!
Besides, still sick, waiting on tests. I understand the need for rationing energy and putting effort into emotional and mental health via giving the brain a break between the covers of a book.
When’s the last time you stayed up too late reading, or snuck chapters at work?
Mad Genius Club 
13 responses to “Just another chapter…”
Last Friday, after I got Alma’s latest Familiar Generations 📖 to beta read.
What did Jerry Pournelle call it? “Heroinware: the first taste is free.” 😇
Yesterday.
As a kid, I carried a paperback around in my pocket so I could read whenever I was stuck somewhere for a few minutes. I also used to sneak a flashlight under my covers to read more in the middle of the night when I was supposed to be sleeping. Now I have an eReader (currently a Kindle, but still have my Nooks).
My kids have old phones we turned into mp3 players/kindle readers.
All the time. Always sorry, but always guilty.
When I was a child (sub-10), I often had insomnia, and would sneak out into the hallway to find the random parental books stashed there. This included some of my father’s childhood story collections, my mother’s random popular novels, and the eclectic books from the misc. lit courses she audited at the local college.
Having grabbed whatever I found, I would smuggle it back into my room. If my parents saw a light under my door, they would interfere, and I didn’t have access to flashlights (and endless batteries), so I would open my closet door which had a light and use that. (Later, when I could afford to maintain flashlights, I used them under the covers.)
This was a functional arrangement, but there were two problems. First, I was really not happy at that age to spot the mouse who would scurry along the walls on the carpet circa1:00 AM. I knew he was unlikely to climb the bed, but it was too much like a big bug for me then. Second, the book I grabbed was sometimes unintelligible or, in one case (The Painted Bird) disturbingly shocking.
The best part of it, though, was bonding with my 7-years older brother. When he was nominally stuck at home babysitting me while our parents went out to dinner, and responsible for enforcing my bedtime (the parents would have seen a light on through my window when they entered the driveway), we struck a deal. I could stay up as late as I wanted, reading under an always-on light in the hallway outside my room, and he would illicitly borrow the other car, planning to get back home before our parents did. We never ratted each other out, then or ever.
In my family, it was “until the end of this chapter” but of course with the implication of ”just another chapter”. :wink:
And I Laughed Out Loud when I opened “We Few” by Weber and Ringo. Ringo decided to not divide it into chapters and Weber (and the editors) allowed it.
IE After a short Prologue, there wasn’t “chapter endings”. 🤣
Better to ask when I have gotten to bed on time. It’s a much shorter list.
Always. I stayed up too late just the other night. I was the kid in elementary school who’s report cards always said, “bright child, but reads in class when we’re doing other subjects.” I don’t really remember that my parents objected to my reading, more that I wasn’t paying attention to other things.
My teachers in middle school made a deal with me: I could read whenever I wanted to, as long as I didn’t disrupt the class and always did my homework/answered questions. Worked for me.
I think it was Castle Hangnail.
Talking about books that can’t be put down (or is that books that can’t help but to be put down?) I just saw an ad in my emails for a retelling of Huckleberry Finn called ‘Jim’ which removes all the “white supremacy and racism” that Twain larded his book down with. Uh, yeah. All so they can retell Finn from the viewpoint of Jim.
Oh yes, it’s called ‘stunning and brave’ and the main note about the author is his ethnicity. Something tells me that Twain’s book need not fear being forgotten in favor of this one.
Not gonna lie, I found Huckleberry Finn a lot more putdownable than Tom Sawyer last time I tried. Still doesn’t mean it should be censored or marginalized.
Jack Campbell’s “The Lost Fleet” was probably the most extreme case of being glued to a book series I’ve been through in the past ten years. I’d gallop through the first part of one book in my spare time during the day, stay up late into the night finishing it, then get up in the morning, click on and buy next book in series(1), and repeat the process all over again. It was what convinced me that ebooks were A Thing and it might be worthwhile to write them, and so a highly successful tradpub author with (so far as I know) no selfpub experience played kind of an important role in convincing me to selfpublish.
(1) Harder to do now, since you can no longer buy books inside the kindle app on the kind of smartphone I use.
Yeah. All Fall while I was just a little under the weather, before the next crud hit.
Now I feel healthy–and stay up till one AM *writing.*