Why do you read books?
What's so great about reading books?
I was asked this today. How would you guys respond to this guy? Why do we value reading so much as a productive use of time?
Everyone says reading builds vocabulary, encorages smartness, makes you success in life and better than video games TV or books. But looking at this quote from Socrates made me think about our high expectations of reading:
What are the benefits of reading every day, all the time?
I’ve always enjoyed reading and have collected many books on a wide range of topics over the years. I have read much about how people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk have read countless books over their lifetimes.
Do you read to better yourself or do you read for pleasure? Or are they the same?
Let me preface this by saying that I went to a sort of elitist high school where literature was heavily stressed, so I have always felt this pressure that if I'm going to read in my free time it should be the literary Titans that I haven't yet tackled. Highlights of the past few years have been Moby Dick, some Dostoevsky, some Dickens, and the most contemporary I've gotten has been some Murakami. These have all been fantastic, and I'm so glad that I've read them. However, many of these undertakings have been pointedly not fun. My last read, Brothers Karamazov, took me nearly eight months for the sole reason that when I became stressed with my work, I would always choose to spend my free time on something else - TV, video games, whatever.
Once I finished Brother's K, I decided to take a break from the serious and have been reading Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. It has been so fun! I've powered through more reading in the past week than I have in the last year and a half combined! It's a great book and I'm glad I'm reading it. Now it's making me want to continue on to read more heavily plot driven and easy to read science fiction and fantasy. (I first got into reading with the LOTR). Anyway, what I'm posting about is this sense of unbelievable guilt that I feel when I'm reading something that might not be considered a major literary work. And I'm asking how can you read something more substantial and dense and still have it be fun and enjoyable? What qualities keep you focused even with the difficulty of the read? And do you think that people really ought to even expend the effort to read them?
If I were to read 200+ books a year or more, what are the benefits of that besides greater knowledge? Can it greatly improve your comprehension, short-term memory and being able to recall passages? Or even being able to recite passages? Surely reading so much improves cognitive ability in some way.
What do you guys think? What are all of the benefits you can think of from reading all time?
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
Why is reading books considered more intellectual than consuming modern content (e.g. TV-series, movies, games)?
question
I absolutely love reading books. I have noticed many people recommend reading books as an intellectual activity in contrast to watching TV-series, movies or playing video games. The content in books is generally in more depth and requires more time to get through, but does that justify its label of being more intellectual (i.e. better for the advancement of one's intellectual capabilities, be it wisdom, reasoning, use of language)? In what regards is reading books a better pasttime?
What's your opinion on this quote? Why do you keep the books you've read?
If it's because you like to reread them, how often do you get around to it, and do you reread a particular type of book more? Why is reading books considered such a good thing? What is the difference cognitively between someone who reads books for entertainment, and someone who watches documentaries yet never reads at all?
This may seem like a silly question, but I really have no answer to exactly why reading is considered so important for a persons cognitive health. Why aren't other means of absorbing knowledge on the same level as reading a thick book? Why should you read novels?
Lately i have this question bothering my mind. Novels may have/not have a lesson behind them, waiting to be learned but is it not better to learn these lessons from informative texts or books? For example if a novel tells a story about racism and concludes that racism is not to be tolerated, wouldn't it be more straightforward and easy if i were to read an encyclopedic text about racism? So what's the point of reading classic novels, when there may be didactical books already explaining about the bigger lesson behind the story? Hello, all. First off, let me say that I have no issue with people reading fiction, none at all. I have read some myself. But predominantly my books of choice are non-fiction. In fact, most of the books I have ever read are non-fiction.
I have only ever read Tolkien's legendarium (being a die-hard fan) and misc. books such as Fahrenheit 451, Metamorphosis, Call of the Wild and a few others. Most of the books I read are informative science/nature/psychology as that's the thing I value most about books, that is their ability to impart knowledge and also to get into the mind of someone who wants to say something.
Now, I'm well aware that fiction can impart a message and get to 'hidden truths', but I personally find it very hard to read fiction. For example, I tried to read The Road and put it down after 80 pages. It wasn't because it was a bad book (imo), it was because I suddenly felt that I wasn't getting anything from it. I wasn't learning from it. As much as this will sound bad to a sub reddit like r/books, for me watching a film does a more successful job at entertaining. I guess I'm more visual in that sense. But in general, fiction doesn't grab me because I don't want to have to sit and focus on characters or wonder if I'm getting the images in my head right, all for the sake of entertainment. And it's all imaginary. I'm all for escapism, but it just doesn't work for me with books. There are plenty of other reasons, but I can't quite think of them right now. Why do you read fiction? How do you read so many books?
So every year I set myself a target of how many books to read. Now, I know it's not a competition or anything like that and I've always read a lot but I really enjoy doing stuff like this. A few years ago I discovered that Goodreads also had this function so started tracking it on there (before I just wrote them down). I'm sure a lot of you use their "Reading Challenge" too.
Do you read more than 1 book at a time?
I have heard more and more of people reading more than 1 book at a time, and I kind of want to know more about it because I think I can use this to read more books, what's r/books opinion on this? Does it take away from the reading experience or is it a go?
Are people, as time goes by, reading books less and less?
I come across this quite a while in some subreddits.
How to get better at reading?
Hi everyone, I’m 30 and suck at reading, I always have, I haven’t read a book since high school but wanted to get back into it after talking to some book loving friends.
I want to enjoy book, but it’s just so physically and mentally exhausting getting through an single chapter, even on things I find interesting.
I am abysmally slow at reading, it took me about two months to read the first lord of the ring book where as my friends all read it in a day and a half.
Am I reading incorrectly? When I read I read each and every word one at a time and even then I have to sometimes go back a regular re read a paragraph because I didn’t understand what happened or I got distracted imagining the scene in my head and didn’t fully comprehend what happened.
My lack of ability to read properly really hurts my self esteem and makes me feel stupid. I don’t understand how I can read every word and still not get what happened or get confused.
How can an adult who’s not read for over a decade learn to read again?
I see how that would make sense.
The internet is easy to navigate and people can easily find stuff that they need to know without the use of books. Everything you need with just a keyboard and a mouse, but i'm still wondering about this. Are people (sepecially kids and young adults) reading less as time goes by? Technology may be replacing books, but will people simply stop reding them? Will they become something old fashioned, not worth a mention? I don't know how much of this is true. Yeah, there are a lot of young people today who wouldn't pick up a book, unless they were forced too, but you will always find exceptions to that. Are there some surveys and studies that have looked into this? What do you think?
Also how do you do it, do you read 1 book 1 day and then the other the next, or switch between the two during the day? Do you take notes to remind yourself of what's going on? Do you ever not finish 1 of the books after all?
Now, I used to read 60+ books a year but recently I'm down to between 30 to 40. The reason is that I stopped having to commute to work by subway. A 20 minute ride each way and I read a third more books! Why do you read?
What’s the reason you open up a book to read? Do you see it as a pastime or is there something behind it?
Ever since I turned ten or so, I stopped reading. I think I did because around that age, I was introduced to video games and quickly became hooked. About ten years later, several days before 2018, my new year's resolution became to read more books, both educational and fiction and now I'm here, having just finished reading my first book on my dad's e-reader. The book is called direwolf: the three shards, and I had a surprisingly amount of fun reading it. Fantasy and science fiction are my favorite genres, and this book is a fantasy book. I really liked how the author has managed to keep the tone of the book fun and fast-paced. I remember that back in the day, I always liked to imagine the characters to be the way I wanted them to be, as in physical appearance. It made imagining the 'scenes' a lot easier. The writer of this book has kept character descriptions pretty basic, and for a new reader such as I, reading the book was a blast. I especially liked how the writer, I believe it's a he, made the planet caliptus fit into our universe so that, after reading it, like with harry potter, i'm wondering whether something like it existing is possible. I also really liked the characters. The main character is a little b**chy, and halfway through the book, a guy named michael, who is also from earth, joins her group of then three friends, and michael is like funny sometimes. There's also a lot of references in the book, making it really feel as if the story takes place in our universe. Overall, the three shards made it really easy for an ex gaming addict like myself to get back into reading books. My question was why you guys read? Do you have any other reasons than liking it?
I personally love to read because it makes me escape reality, in that way I live thousand of different lives, I see million of different worlds and places and I experience what the character is experiencing.
Why do you read? What is the purpose of reading?
My AP Literature teacher told me he thinks every book is an argument; the plot is its means of conveying the argument, and the characters are allegorical and represent human behavior in a given situation. Is this true?
Is reading good for you?
I get told sometimes that reading is "pointless" and that nobody reads anymore, but I believe reading expands your brain, also the brain I believe (learned this from a book by Robert sapolsky) creates new circuits for tasks and such. Like say you suck at reading, but you keep on trying and trying, your brain builds circuits and neurons and such to assist with this task, so you go from reading and struggling in your college classes textbook to being able to read and comprehend better because of the fact you simply do the best you can.
So I think reading, even reading Harry Potter will make you have better reading comprehension in your.... engineering textbook or whatever, what do you think?
I believe books may contain arguments, but that's not the point. I think books allow people to glimpse into another perspective. I don't know if that's to allow me to see the beauty he or she is observing, or better understand his or her argument.
I read Harry Potter and Percy Jackson (so about 22books) when I was in highschool and then just stopped reading novels and started reading comics/mangas. Now I'm in college and I've started reading novels again - but I can 1 book in 20-30 days and y'all read like 6-7 books in a month. And in the r/books subreddit I saw that people generally didn't like speed reading fiction, people often say the same thing against speed reading - 'I speed read war and peace, its about Russia'. And it makes sense, so I didn't really try any speed reading book. But I still want to read more books, I don't want to speed read, I just want to increase my speed enough to read a book in atleast 10 days. And I only read fictional books. I'm currently reading six of crows hardcover edition and I'm averaging about 25-30 pages in an hour. Do y'all have some tips that can help me?
What do you think? I'm curious: what is the point of books?
I also love to read nonfiction books because they’re like fuel to my brain.
I am writing this in Maine. As much as I approve of this coastal pastoral outpost I call home for part of the year I am, at heart, an urban rat. Someone who ultimately feels most at ease in the down and dirty boulevards of a shadowy metropolis. Perhaps this has something to do with my New York heritage - and growing up at a time when the city was a genuinely edgy place of grubby neighborhoods, a high murder rate, dive bars, cheap hotels. In short - the very essence of American noir.
On which note... please meet David Goodis. He was, until recently, the forgotten man of American noir fiction... best remembered as the author of a novel filmed by Francois Truffaut's ‘Shoot the Pianist’. Now The Library of America just published an omnibus of five of his novels (our version of Pléiade - and thus finally bestowing on him the imprimatur of literary importance). I had it sent to me by my local independent bookshop (since they are all closed here for browsing),.I immediately fell into his 1945 novel ‘Dark Passage’. What a nasty, deeply fatalistic tale. A low-ranking business executive gets sent to prison for life for beating his wife’s head in with an ashtray (well, he is a three pack a day smoker). But he didn’t do it. Still he accepts his fate with grim stoicism. Prison is hell. He manages to break out. He ends up on the road to San Francisco. A woman picks him up. She knows his name. She knows he was framed. She gets him to her apartment in the city. She gets him new clothes and gives him money. He heads out into the darkened streets. A taxi driver recognizes who he is (because his photo is everywhere in the papers). He knows a guy who can change his face - for two hundred dollars and several hours of crude plastic surgery agony in a barber’s chair. The guy then gets framed for a second murder. If caught, the gas chamber is his certain destination. But who is playing the vengeance card against him?
This ‘No Exit’ tale - with its staccato prose and its bravura, vast stream-of-thought paragraphs - perfectly captures the ever-nocturnal, tenebrous world of mean street America. Goodis was not just a brilliant stylist, but also someone with his pulse on a society where there is little in the way of personal redemption. Its vision of America as an ongoing harsh exercise in Social Darwinism is perfectly realized. I am still marveling at how brilliantly Goodis sustains the novel’s somber, murky ambiance of existential bleakness . This is noir at its most noir; a small classic of the endless American night.
So what’s the reason you read?
Where is YOUR favorite place to read?
I really enjoy reading on my front porch. With the birds singing, fountain running and my kitty laying next to me, its so relaxing.
Some people I know read upwards of 70 or 100+ books a year, so my question is, how do you do it? Are you just a fast reader? Do you have a job where you can read/listen to audiobooks on the go? How do you read "so many" (compared to whatever you feel like) books? Are there any book lovers here that are in a relationship with a fellow book lover?
This is my dream, to meet someone who shares my love of books and reading. Every person I've been with has found my love of books and reading to be either weird, or boring, or both. Hopefully one day I will meet the one who will lay with me in bed, or under a tree in the park, or on a beach, enjoying each other's focused silence, sharing our love of each other and the written word. Until then..... What annoys you about other readers/book lovers.
I'm working on my list just now,and it's probably going to be a long one,but I'd love to hear from others what irritates you about your fellow bibliophiles? Which cliches about reading are you tired of hearing them spout? One that comes to mind for me is people who cannot accept that you do not love their favourite book. You've read it,you really tried to find the positives about it,but it's just not the book for you,but they cannot accept it. Also people who cannot understand its possible to have a fulfilling life without picking up a book. I love to read.but I don't find it too difficult a concept to grasp that others don't particularly care for it,and prefer other activities instead. The constant paper vs audio vs ebooks debate gets really old too. Just let people enjoy all three or two or whatever works for them. You don't have to ally yourself with one particular side. You can dip in and out of them. Having the choice is a great thing. Don't disparage it just because one of them doesn't work for you. What is the book that turned you into a book lover?
I'm not talking your current favorite book, necessarily. I'm talking the book that made you say "Huh. This whole reading thing is actually pretty good".
I understand it's a silly question.
But why do you read?
Do you read for the stories or do you read for the way the words make you feel?
Do you enjoy being lost in a world that is not your own?
Do you read to learn more and educate yourself or do you read to escape reality?
Personally, I read for the stories and getting lost in a different world (which is why I do not enjoy Sally Rooney-esque writing or most classics - don't come for me pls - there is not much plot and it just seems...mundane to me)
For me, it was 'The Three Musketeers' by Alexandre Dumas. I had an abridged version when I was a kid and found it immensely fascinating. Book lovers of reddit: What (classic or not) book have you not been able to finish? (Due to boredom, fear or any other reason) [x-post from /r/Askreddit]
I personally have a score to settle with "The White Company" by Arthur Conan Doyle since my early teens. I remember Ifirst saw it in the library, along with many other books by the author of Sherlock Holmes. I tried to read it several times, but the translation was horrible (at that time I did not yet read well in English) and I could not pass the first hundred pages.. The plot of the novel seemed
I was asked this today. How would you guys respond to this guy? Why do we value reading so much as a productive use of time?
Everyone says reading builds vocabulary, encorages smartness, makes you success in life and better than video games TV or books. But looking at this quote from Socrates made me think about our high expectations of reading:
What are the benefits of reading every day, all the time?
I’ve always enjoyed reading and have collected many books on a wide range of topics over the years. I have read much about how people like Bill Gates and Elon Musk have read countless books over their lifetimes.
Do you read to better yourself or do you read for pleasure? Or are they the same?
Let me preface this by saying that I went to a sort of elitist high school where literature was heavily stressed, so I have always felt this pressure that if I'm going to read in my free time it should be the literary Titans that I haven't yet tackled. Highlights of the past few years have been Moby Dick, some Dostoevsky, some Dickens, and the most contemporary I've gotten has been some Murakami. These have all been fantastic, and I'm so glad that I've read them. However, many of these undertakings have been pointedly not fun. My last read, Brothers Karamazov, took me nearly eight months for the sole reason that when I became stressed with my work, I would always choose to spend my free time on something else - TV, video games, whatever.
Once I finished Brother's K, I decided to take a break from the serious and have been reading Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. It has been so fun! I've powered through more reading in the past week than I have in the last year and a half combined! It's a great book and I'm glad I'm reading it. Now it's making me want to continue on to read more heavily plot driven and easy to read science fiction and fantasy. (I first got into reading with the LOTR). Anyway, what I'm posting about is this sense of unbelievable guilt that I feel when I'm reading something that might not be considered a major literary work. And I'm asking how can you read something more substantial and dense and still have it be fun and enjoyable? What qualities keep you focused even with the difficulty of the read? And do you think that people really ought to even expend the effort to read them?
If I were to read 200+ books a year or more, what are the benefits of that besides greater knowledge? Can it greatly improve your comprehension, short-term memory and being able to recall passages? Or even being able to recite passages? Surely reading so much improves cognitive ability in some way.
What do you guys think? What are all of the benefits you can think of from reading all time?
"For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things, when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise."
Why is reading books considered more intellectual than consuming modern content (e.g. TV-series, movies, games)?
question
I absolutely love reading books. I have noticed many people recommend reading books as an intellectual activity in contrast to watching TV-series, movies or playing video games. The content in books is generally in more depth and requires more time to get through, but does that justify its label of being more intellectual (i.e. better for the advancement of one's intellectual capabilities, be it wisdom, reasoning, use of language)? In what regards is reading books a better pasttime?
What's your opinion on this quote? Why do you keep the books you've read?
If it's because you like to reread them, how often do you get around to it, and do you reread a particular type of book more? Why is reading books considered such a good thing? What is the difference cognitively between someone who reads books for entertainment, and someone who watches documentaries yet never reads at all?
This may seem like a silly question, but I really have no answer to exactly why reading is considered so important for a persons cognitive health. Why aren't other means of absorbing knowledge on the same level as reading a thick book? Why should you read novels?
Lately i have this question bothering my mind. Novels may have/not have a lesson behind them, waiting to be learned but is it not better to learn these lessons from informative texts or books? For example if a novel tells a story about racism and concludes that racism is not to be tolerated, wouldn't it be more straightforward and easy if i were to read an encyclopedic text about racism? So what's the point of reading classic novels, when there may be didactical books already explaining about the bigger lesson behind the story? Hello, all. First off, let me say that I have no issue with people reading fiction, none at all. I have read some myself. But predominantly my books of choice are non-fiction. In fact, most of the books I have ever read are non-fiction.
I have only ever read Tolkien's legendarium (being a die-hard fan) and misc. books such as Fahrenheit 451, Metamorphosis, Call of the Wild and a few others. Most of the books I read are informative science/nature/psychology as that's the thing I value most about books, that is their ability to impart knowledge and also to get into the mind of someone who wants to say something.
Now, I'm well aware that fiction can impart a message and get to 'hidden truths', but I personally find it very hard to read fiction. For example, I tried to read The Road and put it down after 80 pages. It wasn't because it was a bad book (imo), it was because I suddenly felt that I wasn't getting anything from it. I wasn't learning from it. As much as this will sound bad to a sub reddit like r/books, for me watching a film does a more successful job at entertaining. I guess I'm more visual in that sense. But in general, fiction doesn't grab me because I don't want to have to sit and focus on characters or wonder if I'm getting the images in my head right, all for the sake of entertainment. And it's all imaginary. I'm all for escapism, but it just doesn't work for me with books. There are plenty of other reasons, but I can't quite think of them right now. Why do you read fiction? How do you read so many books?
So every year I set myself a target of how many books to read. Now, I know it's not a competition or anything like that and I've always read a lot but I really enjoy doing stuff like this. A few years ago I discovered that Goodreads also had this function so started tracking it on there (before I just wrote them down). I'm sure a lot of you use their "Reading Challenge" too.
Do you read more than 1 book at a time?
I have heard more and more of people reading more than 1 book at a time, and I kind of want to know more about it because I think I can use this to read more books, what's r/books opinion on this? Does it take away from the reading experience or is it a go?
Are people, as time goes by, reading books less and less?
I come across this quite a while in some subreddits.
How to get better at reading?
Hi everyone, I’m 30 and suck at reading, I always have, I haven’t read a book since high school but wanted to get back into it after talking to some book loving friends.
I want to enjoy book, but it’s just so physically and mentally exhausting getting through an single chapter, even on things I find interesting.
I am abysmally slow at reading, it took me about two months to read the first lord of the ring book where as my friends all read it in a day and a half.
Am I reading incorrectly? When I read I read each and every word one at a time and even then I have to sometimes go back a regular re read a paragraph because I didn’t understand what happened or I got distracted imagining the scene in my head and didn’t fully comprehend what happened.
My lack of ability to read properly really hurts my self esteem and makes me feel stupid. I don’t understand how I can read every word and still not get what happened or get confused.
How can an adult who’s not read for over a decade learn to read again?
I see how that would make sense.
The internet is easy to navigate and people can easily find stuff that they need to know without the use of books. Everything you need with just a keyboard and a mouse, but i'm still wondering about this. Are people (sepecially kids and young adults) reading less as time goes by? Technology may be replacing books, but will people simply stop reding them? Will they become something old fashioned, not worth a mention? I don't know how much of this is true. Yeah, there are a lot of young people today who wouldn't pick up a book, unless they were forced too, but you will always find exceptions to that. Are there some surveys and studies that have looked into this? What do you think?
Also how do you do it, do you read 1 book 1 day and then the other the next, or switch between the two during the day? Do you take notes to remind yourself of what's going on? Do you ever not finish 1 of the books after all?
Now, I used to read 60+ books a year but recently I'm down to between 30 to 40. The reason is that I stopped having to commute to work by subway. A 20 minute ride each way and I read a third more books! Why do you read?
What’s the reason you open up a book to read? Do you see it as a pastime or is there something behind it?
Ever since I turned ten or so, I stopped reading. I think I did because around that age, I was introduced to video games and quickly became hooked. About ten years later, several days before 2018, my new year's resolution became to read more books, both educational and fiction and now I'm here, having just finished reading my first book on my dad's e-reader. The book is called direwolf: the three shards, and I had a surprisingly amount of fun reading it. Fantasy and science fiction are my favorite genres, and this book is a fantasy book. I really liked how the author has managed to keep the tone of the book fun and fast-paced. I remember that back in the day, I always liked to imagine the characters to be the way I wanted them to be, as in physical appearance. It made imagining the 'scenes' a lot easier. The writer of this book has kept character descriptions pretty basic, and for a new reader such as I, reading the book was a blast. I especially liked how the writer, I believe it's a he, made the planet caliptus fit into our universe so that, after reading it, like with harry potter, i'm wondering whether something like it existing is possible. I also really liked the characters. The main character is a little b**chy, and halfway through the book, a guy named michael, who is also from earth, joins her group of then three friends, and michael is like funny sometimes. There's also a lot of references in the book, making it really feel as if the story takes place in our universe. Overall, the three shards made it really easy for an ex gaming addict like myself to get back into reading books. My question was why you guys read? Do you have any other reasons than liking it?
I personally love to read because it makes me escape reality, in that way I live thousand of different lives, I see million of different worlds and places and I experience what the character is experiencing.
Why do you read? What is the purpose of reading?
My AP Literature teacher told me he thinks every book is an argument; the plot is its means of conveying the argument, and the characters are allegorical and represent human behavior in a given situation. Is this true?
Is reading good for you?
I get told sometimes that reading is "pointless" and that nobody reads anymore, but I believe reading expands your brain, also the brain I believe (learned this from a book by Robert sapolsky) creates new circuits for tasks and such. Like say you suck at reading, but you keep on trying and trying, your brain builds circuits and neurons and such to assist with this task, so you go from reading and struggling in your college classes textbook to being able to read and comprehend better because of the fact you simply do the best you can.
So I think reading, even reading Harry Potter will make you have better reading comprehension in your.... engineering textbook or whatever, what do you think?
I believe books may contain arguments, but that's not the point. I think books allow people to glimpse into another perspective. I don't know if that's to allow me to see the beauty he or she is observing, or better understand his or her argument.
I read Harry Potter and Percy Jackson (so about 22books) when I was in highschool and then just stopped reading novels and started reading comics/mangas. Now I'm in college and I've started reading novels again - but I can 1 book in 20-30 days and y'all read like 6-7 books in a month. And in the r/books subreddit I saw that people generally didn't like speed reading fiction, people often say the same thing against speed reading - 'I speed read war and peace, its about Russia'. And it makes sense, so I didn't really try any speed reading book. But I still want to read more books, I don't want to speed read, I just want to increase my speed enough to read a book in atleast 10 days. And I only read fictional books. I'm currently reading six of crows hardcover edition and I'm averaging about 25-30 pages in an hour. Do y'all have some tips that can help me?
What do you think? I'm curious: what is the point of books?
I also love to read nonfiction books because they’re like fuel to my brain.
I am writing this in Maine. As much as I approve of this coastal pastoral outpost I call home for part of the year I am, at heart, an urban rat. Someone who ultimately feels most at ease in the down and dirty boulevards of a shadowy metropolis. Perhaps this has something to do with my New York heritage - and growing up at a time when the city was a genuinely edgy place of grubby neighborhoods, a high murder rate, dive bars, cheap hotels. In short - the very essence of American noir.
On which note... please meet David Goodis. He was, until recently, the forgotten man of American noir fiction... best remembered as the author of a novel filmed by Francois Truffaut's ‘Shoot the Pianist’. Now The Library of America just published an omnibus of five of his novels (our version of Pléiade - and thus finally bestowing on him the imprimatur of literary importance). I had it sent to me by my local independent bookshop (since they are all closed here for browsing),.I immediately fell into his 1945 novel ‘Dark Passage’. What a nasty, deeply fatalistic tale. A low-ranking business executive gets sent to prison for life for beating his wife’s head in with an ashtray (well, he is a three pack a day smoker). But he didn’t do it. Still he accepts his fate with grim stoicism. Prison is hell. He manages to break out. He ends up on the road to San Francisco. A woman picks him up. She knows his name. She knows he was framed. She gets him to her apartment in the city. She gets him new clothes and gives him money. He heads out into the darkened streets. A taxi driver recognizes who he is (because his photo is everywhere in the papers). He knows a guy who can change his face - for two hundred dollars and several hours of crude plastic surgery agony in a barber’s chair. The guy then gets framed for a second murder. If caught, the gas chamber is his certain destination. But who is playing the vengeance card against him?
This ‘No Exit’ tale - with its staccato prose and its bravura, vast stream-of-thought paragraphs - perfectly captures the ever-nocturnal, tenebrous world of mean street America. Goodis was not just a brilliant stylist, but also someone with his pulse on a society where there is little in the way of personal redemption. Its vision of America as an ongoing harsh exercise in Social Darwinism is perfectly realized. I am still marveling at how brilliantly Goodis sustains the novel’s somber, murky ambiance of existential bleakness . This is noir at its most noir; a small classic of the endless American night.
So what’s the reason you read?
Where is YOUR favorite place to read?
I really enjoy reading on my front porch. With the birds singing, fountain running and my kitty laying next to me, its so relaxing.
Some people I know read upwards of 70 or 100+ books a year, so my question is, how do you do it? Are you just a fast reader? Do you have a job where you can read/listen to audiobooks on the go? How do you read "so many" (compared to whatever you feel like) books? Are there any book lovers here that are in a relationship with a fellow book lover?
This is my dream, to meet someone who shares my love of books and reading. Every person I've been with has found my love of books and reading to be either weird, or boring, or both. Hopefully one day I will meet the one who will lay with me in bed, or under a tree in the park, or on a beach, enjoying each other's focused silence, sharing our love of each other and the written word. Until then..... What annoys you about other readers/book lovers.
I'm working on my list just now,and it's probably going to be a long one,but I'd love to hear from others what irritates you about your fellow bibliophiles? Which cliches about reading are you tired of hearing them spout? One that comes to mind for me is people who cannot accept that you do not love their favourite book. You've read it,you really tried to find the positives about it,but it's just not the book for you,but they cannot accept it. Also people who cannot understand its possible to have a fulfilling life without picking up a book. I love to read.but I don't find it too difficult a concept to grasp that others don't particularly care for it,and prefer other activities instead. The constant paper vs audio vs ebooks debate gets really old too. Just let people enjoy all three or two or whatever works for them. You don't have to ally yourself with one particular side. You can dip in and out of them. Having the choice is a great thing. Don't disparage it just because one of them doesn't work for you. What is the book that turned you into a book lover?
I'm not talking your current favorite book, necessarily. I'm talking the book that made you say "Huh. This whole reading thing is actually pretty good".
I understand it's a silly question.
But why do you read?
Do you read for the stories or do you read for the way the words make you feel?
Do you enjoy being lost in a world that is not your own?
Do you read to learn more and educate yourself or do you read to escape reality?
Personally, I read for the stories and getting lost in a different world (which is why I do not enjoy Sally Rooney-esque writing or most classics - don't come for me pls - there is not much plot and it just seems...mundane to me)
For me, it was 'The Three Musketeers' by Alexandre Dumas. I had an abridged version when I was a kid and found it immensely fascinating. Book lovers of reddit: What (classic or not) book have you not been able to finish? (Due to boredom, fear or any other reason) [x-post from /r/Askreddit]
I personally have a score to settle with "The White Company" by Arthur Conan Doyle since my early teens. I remember Ifirst saw it in the library, along with many other books by the author of Sherlock Holmes. I tried to read it several times, but the translation was horrible (at that time I did not yet read well in English) and I could not pass the first hundred pages.. The plot of the novel seemed
