Entering a new world - overcoming resistence

I have a strange habit.  I'll go to the bookshop and buy a couple of books I really want to read - and then I'll put them on my bookshelf and leave them there.  Sometimes these books will sit there for a few weeks until I pick one up and start to read.

And when I do start on one I'm not always hooked immediately.  I might read the first few pages, then put the book back on the shelf again for a while. Some days I have a real resistence to entering into a brand new world.  But wait a minute!  These worlds I'm having trouble entering belong to books I want to read.  So what's going on here?

I think it's a complex tangle of things.  The first factor that has a bearing is that I'm not just a simple reader.  Yes, I'm reading a book I want to read, but the reading comes with the baggage of being a writer too.  Writers read differently from non-writers.

As I turn the pages I'm absorbing information about the book's pacing, the choice of viewpoint characters, and choices about where the narrative gets switched between them. To give one example, Becky  Chambers' A Closed and Common Orbit is one of my all-time favourite books.  But it isn't a grand adventure book with lots of sound and fury.  It's a quiet book about relationships and the search for identity.  And yet, despite the at times low-key narrative, many of the chapters still end on cliffhangers.  It is a book I greatly admire for its story crafting techniques as much as for the story.

But sometimes I'm reluctant to be taken by the story.  Sometimes I fear the book is too close to the one I'm writing.  Oh, no!  What I'm doing has been done before!  I'm wasting my time, the Imposter cries.  Better give up now.

I think this fear of discovering that my own work won't stand up to other writers' work is sometimes behind my reluctance to enter their worlds.  I'm afraid I'll find that they've taken MY idea, and turned it into something much better than I could ever have done.  There goes the Imposter again.

It's all really nonsense.  What other writers produce is their own unique narratives, just as I do.  And it really is time I learned to uncouple my baggage and my fears, and just simply read their stories.  Would this change if I was mainstream published?  I don't know.  Only time will tell.