When I was a little girl, there were some things I couldn’t wait to be old enough to do, like wearing heels and makeup, reading and smoking. Fortunately for me, I didn’t become a smoker. But reading and heels? Oh yeah, I’ll probably always love those.

The problem is, now that I threw writing into the mix, I have far less time for reading, which leads to what I call “reading shame”. I look around and all I seem to notice are two very distinct, some might say antithetical categories. There are those who won’t crack open a book if their lives depended on it, and the others, who apparently have decided to forgo sleep, work, eating and any sort of personal life in favour of reading.

Only it’s not quite so, they appear to somehow juggle all of the above while devouring a small library at the same time. A few months into the year and they’ll casually mention having read over a hundred books, while I secretly carry out some complicated mental creative reading accounting just to reach double digits – I mean, I can add all those times I read my own new book while editing, that counts, right?

So once again I find myself somewhere in-between. I’m by no means a slow reader, but I’m clearly not as fast as I once thought myself to be. Contrary to common belief that people fall into two groups – fiction and non-fiction readers – I enjoy both. In fact, I believe we need to read both. No matter what I read, I will stop and overthink certain passages and ideas, I will highlight fragments and often make notes. (That’s why I don’t generally borrow books.) How much of that goes on depends on the book, but nuggets of wisdom or style can be found even in the lightest of readings.

Among all the things I love about reading, surprise and diversity rank highly. I may subscribe to the theory that everything has already been written, one way or another (when it comes to fiction), but that doesn’t mean we’ll ever be able to read it all, so of course we can still find novelty among the pages. So when I heard someone say – right after confessing that they read hundreds of books a year – that if the “book boyfriend” is different than what they think he should be, they stop reading, I went, WTF?????? Restrict that even further by accepting only a couple of specific genres, and isn’t that like reading the same book over and over and over again? Hundreds of times a year… only to start all over again next year. I mean, give the poor book boyfriend a chance, he might change, learn the error of his ways somewhere down the line, he and the book itself might surprise you. And isn’t that the best part?

That was the moment when AI generated books suddenly made sense, in a sad and frightening way. Type in your preferences and the machine will churn out exactly what you want to read, again and again. The same thing you’ve already read countless times, but hopefully in a different setting with different character names. No need to stop and ask any questions, to analyse and wonder why or challenge your set-in-stone beliefs. No challenge. Nothing new to discover. No new lessons to be learnt.

As real life, human writers – creatures becoming obsolete by the minute – we can throw all the tantrums we like, but the truth remains, there’s a market for it. That’s what many want. We can argue that they’re manipulated to choose a certain way, but before AI came along, there already were people pulling the strings. We can’t blame it all on technology or only on those behind it.

Therefore, I’m trying to make peace with my reading and writing pace, while learning to exist in this ever-changing world, where books are spat out by an algorithm, and apparently so are reviews or beta readers’ feedback. I’d like to say I’m not at all worried, but… of course all this changes the way I perceive many aspects of my writing life. A recent example – I changed my mind about offering some free copies of my new ebook before its release date after learning that there are readers who use AI to generate their reviews or at least a summary, which can lead to all sorts of unpleasant surprises. But hey, it makes sense. If we use AI to write our books for us, why not use it to read them for us too?

How about you, my blogging friends? What’s your reading speed, do you ever feel like you’re not reading enough? So much so, that you’re perhaps already delegating the task to a machine?