My Favourite Writer... or How I Rediscovered The Joy of Reading and Writing

I use to read tons of books, at most, twice a week. So most stories had become a bore; the charaters stereotyped, the plot predictable and the lengthy narrative tedious and laborous to read. Of late, I would pick up a book, read a couple of pages, lose interest and put it down again. It didn’t matter if the story builds up to a fulfilling climax eventually. If I wasn’t hooked by Page 3, I wasn’t interested. I have too many things to do these days to invest my time in reading fiction, even if they were critically acclaimed.
I thought I’d given up on books – until I discovered Sophie Kinsella’s ‘Confessions of a Shopaholic’. With that book, I was hooked from the first scene! It was possibly the first time I read a book written entirely in the present tense. Perhaps that was the novely factor. On the other hand, it was also the funniest book I have ever read and the most captivating. I laughed uncontrollably at almost every page, and kept turning the pages until I had spent an entire weekend reading it non-stop (save for breaks for food and sleep).
Sophie, I believe, hit jackpot with that book. She applied that phrase ‘that which is most personal, is probably most general’ to great effect, creating situations one could relate to, with continuous self-depreciating humour. Her descriptions were bare compared to most fiction writers, but focused on important details and left the rest to the imagination. This keeps the distraction level to a minimum (and anyway, how many ways can you describe eye colour before you get sick reading the same line year after year) and sucks the reader in completely with the characters, rather than kept them as outsiders peering in as an author would if he/she focused too much on descriptive narrative.
Simply put, I was completely bowled over.
Ask me a decade ago who my favourite author is and my answer would have been the likes of Enid Blyton, Jack London (Call of the Wild), William Shakespeare (what was I thinking?!) , Ken Folllet (Eye of the Needle) and Clive Cussler (yeah, of the Dirk Pitt series) but today it’s undoubtedly Sophie Kinsella. Yes, it’s ‘chick lit’; hardly the stuff of literary masterpiece and yes, she only ever wrote one book that was great but hey, sometimes genuis comes in a flash.
If I can captivate audience the way she can, create characters people can fall in love with, inject a healthy dose of humour or thrilling suspense to the plot and make reading fun for many people, I would be one happy camper! ☺