Musing Mondays - Colouring books & novel pacing

Musing Mondays - November 7, 2016

Musing Mondays is a weekly meme that asks you to choose one of the following prompts to answer:

• I’m currently reading…

• Up next I think I’ll read…

• I bought the following book(s) in the past week…

• I’m super excited to tell you about (book/author/bookish-news)…

• I’m really upset by (book/author/bookish-news)…

• I can’t wait to get a copy of…

• I wish I could read ___, but…

• I blogged about ____ this past week…

I’m super excited to tell you about (book/author/bookish-news)…the colouring book I won on Goodreads...

I enter a lot of the giveaways on Goodreads in hopes of getting some interesting books. I've won about a half a dozen times now and one or two of the books that I've received I would call duds, really not as great as the cover blurbs made them out to be. So overall I would say the giveaways can be pretty hit or miss but I still keep doing them. I've never won any of the books I *really* want - like when there was a giveaway for 10 copies of Gena Showalter's most recent Lords of the Underworld book, I was absolutely desperate for it but so were thousands of other people so I didn't stand a chance.

This is one I won recently though, it's a colouring book. The draw was on October 1 and my copy arrived on November 2. It had been so long since I'd won it that when I saw the package in my mailbox from Harlequin I was actually confused for a minute about what it could be! This particular colouring book is called What Lifts Your Heart: Uplifting Designs to Color & Create it is 96 pages and according to Goodreads it is by a famous street artist:

"From globe-trotting artist Kelsey Montague, whose uplifting murals have dotted Sydney's shores, Manhattan's sultry streets, California's coastline and everywhere in between, comes a beautiful new interactive adult coloring book.
Famed for blending street art and social media, Kelsey Montague's amazing illustrations invite colorists of all ages to make her unique creations their own. Her pen-and-ink drawings uplift the spirit with fanciful images of butterflies, ladybug wings and kites. Unlike other coloring books, Kelsey's includes several special sections that allow artists to share their dreams, to make 3-D art, and to create wearable art in the form of flirty masks, top hats and fascinators. In all her designs, Kelsey has hidden a heart to find and decorate.
Printed on high-quality paper with excellent opacity and perforated pages, these designs lend themselves to brilliant bursts of color. WHAT LIFTS YOUR HEART encourages colorists to look to their own hearts for inspiration and to share that joy with others."

I will agree with their assessment about the construction of the book the paper is great quality for colouring with markers (my preferred tool). There's no bleed through which is a problem I have been having with several of my purchased colouring books. The designs are really great, very street art-y with not a lot of overly small bits that make colouring super tricky. (I have a few books where you just look at the image and start laughing because there's literally no way to colour the images...RIP really awesome architecture colouring book you will probably stay uncoloured forever.)

Here's a shot of the only image I've had the chance to colour in so far:

          THIS WEEK’S RANDOM QUESTION: Do you prefer fast-paced novels, or slow, descriptive novels?

I tend towards a preference for faster paced novels which upon reflection really doesn't surprise me to realise because I've always been partial to action movies and other movie and TV genres that have a lot of fast pacing and a lot going on in them. Give me a really page turner where there's a lot going on and it's all happening fast and I will not put the book down. When I am into a book and the pacing of the book is such that I won't put it down, I can quite easily read 100+ pages an hour. As an example 2 novels that I consider fast paced: Harry Potter and the Dealthy Hallows and The Reckoning 607 pages and 391 pages respectively. I read the former in just under 8 hours cover to cover including food and bathroom breaks and chatting on AIM with Angie. The latter took just under 4 hours cover to cover the first time I read it and again that was while chatting with Angie. Lots of action in both books - I find J.K. Rowling and Kelley Armstrong in general to be pretty fast paced writers; which I suspect is what keeps throwing me every time I try to read The Casual Vacancy because it is much slower paced than any of the HP books were.

For me the slower the pace of the novel the more likely I am to set it aside, and if I find myself setting it aside enough I sometimes cannot bring myself to get back to it. I previously mentioned The Casual Vacancy and that's an example of what I mean here. I've started that book and set it aside at least twice for something with a faster pace. I suspect this might also be the reason I haven't had much luck to date with getting into non-fiction. Perhaps I need to find a genre of non-fiction that is faster paced. I'm 100% okay with my preference towards faster paced stories, it really is a personal preference. Like Ranganathan's five laws of library science say, every reader has their book and every book has its reader.