how much do you read?

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
also never remember even the faintest details of anything i've read after i've finished it. which is good if you want to re-read something, elss good if you want to impress people with your eridition.

Ha ha, i'm like this too. I'm particularly bad with characters' names, so if its a book with loads of characters I can get quite confused. I also tend to speed up in anticipation of the end of the book, just so I can finish it. Ask me what happened in it a few months later and I often haven't got the foggiest.
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
Ha ha, i'm like this too. I'm particularly bad with characters' names, so if its a book with loads of characters I can get quite confused.
me too

in the past few years i've gotten into the habit of writing down the names of characters on the endpapers, along with the page number on which they are first described, and a brief (two to four word) summary of who they are; sometimes, i add page numbers when more sig. events happen in connection with that character. basically i build an index for refreshing my broken brain.

before i did this, forgetting characters was a big reason why i gave up on big books. now i can feel smart.
 

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
That's an excellent idea, I might have a go at that myself.

My housemate's been reading 'Infinite Jest' recently, he's been at it since xmas and he's still only halfway through! I think I would have given up by now.
 

empty mirror

remember the jackalope
yeah infinite jest is one of those that you need to keep track of dozens of characters; that and gravitys rainbow... without a list of characters i'd have been lost
 

luka

Well-known member
i tried doing that but it wasn't practical. you know, on trains and buses and stuff.
that might be why i gave up on gravitys rainbow. the list was going so well too....
 

Client Eastwood

Well-known member
A lot less than I used to. Currently about a book a month. There was a time when I would come home from work and do an hour with a cup of tea and an hour in bed. But nowadays it just when I can fit it in and I find it hard to maintain any continuity. Sometimes I reread pages accidently only to realise a couple of pages later.
 

cobretti

[-] :: [-] ~ [-] :: [-]
Not enough. Used to read about a book a month, but reading tends to fall by the wayside when it's contending with skating, going out, videogames, films, spending time with my girlfriend etc. Shocking I know.

Depending on the length of the book, I usually take 2-4 weeks per book. I started on Robert Charles Wilson's 'Spin' last week, and it'll probably take me another couple of weeks to finish. After that I've got a couple of other novels and some entry level philosophy stuff lined up. 2 years of retail shite seems to have killed part of my brain, and I'm trying to jog it back in to gear.
 

jenks

thread death
I started keeping a list of what I have read back in 1991 and have kept it going ever since. I average 70 or so books a year, when I was commuting on the train I averaged over a hundred a year. Things have slowed in the last couple of years - this has coincided with my discovery of bike riding and its concomitatnt effect on my sleep - I am just not staying up as late to read as I generally conk out.

I have also found that I used to be able to whizz through huge books - I read IJ in ten days and would be able to lay wasted to a Dickens inside a fortnight but now I find I am reading half a dozen books at a time so my laborious read of Bros K has taken me since Feb!
 

STN

sou'wester
So, is there anyone here who's one of those people who won't give up on books? I've never been one of them, I'm happy to give up.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I'm a bit like that. It's very very rare for me to give up on a book. I don't know why, it's not really a virtue is it? Just kind of bloody-mindedness - sometimes it leads to you just reading really really fast trying desperately to force your way through to the end.
 

crackerjack

Well-known member
So, is there anyone here who's one of those people who won't give up on books? I've never been one of them, I'm happy to give up.

I used to be like that. My Dad gave me Gormenghast once, and I slogged through to the end, as always, and swore never again. Now I chuck 'em in quite often, most recently the Yiddish Policeman's Union - not sure I really like that ultra-Jewish Helleresque humour like I used to.

Life's too short and I've got a shelf full of books to read instead.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
I usually have several books lying around at once. Some I'm reading (Bunyan's Logics of Worlds, Badiou's The Pilgrim's Progress), some I've been looking something up in and have kept around because I haven't looked at them in a while and may fancy another dip into them later, some are recent acquisitions waiting to be started. There are a couple of maths books I take a few pages at a time, with long intervals in between. I very rarely read anything linearly from start to finish, unless it's a novel and is supposed to be read that way, and not always even then.

I don't read enough poetry - the last was Berryman's Dream Songs, earlier this year. I always have a book with me on the train to and from work, and tend to read through a particular author during the commute (an hour each way). I don't bother much with magazines or newspapers, apart from Viz and occasionally Computer Music when there's something decent on the cover DVD.
 

BareBones

wheezy
i tend to only read on trains and buses, to and from work, so i generally only get in about an hour, hour and a half of reading a day. Though my girlfriend and I split up recently so i've been reading much more at home the last couple of months. It took me three months to read Infinite Jest. It took me a whole year to read Gravity's Rainbow, but I was reading it for a couple of months, putting it down and reading something else, then picking it up again. I started Robeto Bolano '2666' a couple of weeks ago, i'm about 300 pages in, so i'm getting through it quicker than I expected, but the language is so beautifully simple so that's probably why. I'm only reading pretty long books at the moment so i'm definitely not one of these two-or-three books per month people. And I really only ever read fiction these days. This forum always makes me feel like i should go back and re-read all the Deleuze and academic theory stuff I read at university, because i've totally forgotten it all, but I can't bring myself to do it, because I just enjoy reading fiction too much.

I'm totally with luka, benny, empty mirror etc on forgetting pretty much everything about a book after i've read it. It's infuriating.

I pretty much always stick a book out until the end, even if i'm not enjoying it... unless it's really terrible.
 
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