How much do you really enjoy reading (books)?

For some of us, I think the brain needs a regular change of scenery.

No really, I do want to hear other people's thoughts on their own reading and not just reactions to mine.

Certainly however the fact that there can be written communication online (and here we are!) takes up 'reading time' as much as anything, so there is that. At the same time what I've really noticed is that I don't dip into my collection as much, or limit it to a few favorites, where the majority of what I'm really reading are selections from my local library -- and since my local library is the one I work at at UC Irvine, this tends to mean quite a bit of range to choose from. My sense of having to maintain and expand a personal library as such as dimished as a result, and I don't mind really.

however, i think that there are plenty of other ways for you to be exposed to new ideas and other people's thoughts and opinions... i d don't perceive it as enjoyable to feel 'obliged' to do anything, be it reading books or otherwise. i think the only thing you can do, if you feel you must do anything at all, is continue to start books until you stumble across those you find engrossing.

OTFM

so true, maybe you should just read any old thing till you get back into it! i read a 'young adult' category book on the weekend, it is on yr 10 english booklists here in australia. i loved it, couldn't put it down. i was pretty good at english lit, i won a stack of english prizes at uni and highschool, so it's not as if i feel i don't understand or appreciate 'literature', but i definitely totally enjoy reading all sorts of other stuff too.

But I'm not. I read voraciously, but not books. Websites, magazines, newspapers, the back of cereal boxes, sure: but not novels, or non fiction, all that often now. I think the last new thing I picked up, read and finished was Atwoods "the Handmaids Tale" ages and ages ago.

I feel ashamed that as a supposed writer I havent even read much of the "canon".

it was 'looking for alibrandi' adam. it was a pretty straightforward story, but i loved all the characters.

so true, maybe you should just read any old thing till you get back into it!"

Yeah, I've sometimes suspected this would help. My mom was one of those "Why don't you read a classic instead" people and I think it really made me dislike classics even as I consistently forced myself to read them.

Oh good lord, there's plenty of it I've not read and frankly I don't care as much about that any more. I actually find reading nonfiction is better than fiction when it comes to being a writer, for me at least...

My head hurts like a thousand dogs today, literally and metaphysically, and I'm rather down. I really need to create, but it's all stuck... thats for another thread though.

also, i've always had doubts about whether it's actually possible to 'waste' leisure time.... surely if it's leisure time and you enjoy whatever activity you're doing, it's not a waste?

Behind the sense in your head that you have to keep up. Ditch that and you can relax. The only stance I've had to resist much since then is the idea that because a certain form of mass media exists it must be engaged with at the cost of not fitting in. Tep and I have argued that before many times and I respect his stance but don't accept it.

There's nothing like the feeling you get when you stand back from a massive fuck-off tome of a book and see that you're past the halfway mark. Even more so when it's a book that you can't put down, which in the massive fuck-off tome stakes happens rarely.

The type of books you choose to read should change as your life changes and your needs change. I think it is perfectly fine to halt reading novels at the point where you feel you've 'got' what you could get out of them and, considered as stories, they no longer delight, entertain or amuse you.

There isn't any magic bullet in continuing to read this or that because you're 'supposed' to. Keep looking to improve your mind, improve your life, improve your relationships, by whatever means you can. Don't limit yourself according to some rigid idea of what is supposed to work for you. Go by results.

But don't stop reading, if only because reading gives you intimate access to the knowledge, experiences, inner thoughts and cherished ideas of hundreds of thousands of authors. That's a hell of a resource. Don't trash it, just get down with it for you.

Have you ever explored the wonderful world of cartography? Deep ocean ichthyology? The Mau-mau rebellion? Roman coins? Eygptian gods?
The Marquis de Sade? Francois Villon's poetry?

Get creative, man. Live a little!

And honestly, there are classics I love but still don't exactly enjoy reading for fun, like The Trojan Women or something. I can't finish history books, either - The Black Sea is sitting three feet away, half finished, untouched for three months. I'd rather enjoy books I like than feel guilty about not being well-rounded, though. (The best fun books I've read were Snow Crash and The Sot-Weed Factor, which are both light reading you can't put down but are still also quite good.)

Tho I dont suppose how-to books on photoshop might count ;)

I'm dreadful at study because of this.

The only bars I've seen that have not been lit well enough for me to read in them have been in nightclubs.

damn boston sounds like it sucks

i usually don't feel comfortable by myself in bars (a "lady" doesn't spend time in bars alone), but when the occasion arises i'm always grateful to have a book to focus my attention on. it sends out a "leave me alone" signal.

a good female friend of mine often goes out to bars alone to read and pick up dudes

max have you like never read any of my posts re: Boston

(although I am including NYC, DC, LA, SF, LV and MSP places in that statement, but then again I can read in almost total darkness)

http://www.calvintang.com/albums/Philippines/lg/big%20eyes4s.jpg

(dan going out for a night of readin')

xpost

Drinking at Bars (Male Version): I will totally do this at the right kind of bar, because (a) sometimes I want to drink and read at the same time, plus (b) bars are open later than cafes, but yeah, you have to accept that it's unusual. If the place serves any kind of food whatsoever, you are better off getting a plate and leaving it in front of you, cause then evidently it's normal. Otherwise you just have to adopt a generous and patient attitude w/r/t people talking to you or asking questions, because it is a social environment, so people are kinda ... within their rights to talk to you. (Even if some of them do adopt this seriously aggressive/defensive knock-you-down-a-peg tone about the possibility that you'd find printed matter more interesting than whatever wall they're staring at.)

Drinking at Bars (Female Version): Yeah so my sense if that if you're attractive and try the wrong bar you will get the fuck bothered out of you and then dudes will act like you're a bitch for wanting to read instead of getting bothered? Unless you can establish yourself in a chill local place as someone who reads and that's just how it is. I don't know about if you're unattractive, maybe everyone just ignores you, but I don't think I've ever seen an unattractive girl reading at a bar, or else maybe I just find any girl who reads at a bar automatically attractive

a good female friend of mine often goes out to bars alone to read and pick up dudes

ideal pick up book ime

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n43/n219374.jpg

haha that woman should have a fight with a woman who goes to bars alone to read and wants to be left alone

Drinking at Bars (Female Version): Yeah so my sense if that if you're attractive and try the wrong bar you will get the fuck bothered out of you and then dudes will act like you're a bitch for wanting to read instead of getting bothered?

i don't know if being attractive has anything to do with it? i think some guys will just try their luck with whomever's around.

lolz you don't say...

am i hitting close to home there, shakes?

true, true -- actually I suppose a lot of guys would home in on someone they perceived as unattractive and reading as some sort of easy mark

I don't know about if you're unattractive, maybe everyone just ignores you, but I don't think I've ever seen an unattractive girl reading at a bar, or else maybe I just find any girl who reads at a bar automatically attractive

― nabisco, Monday, 8 June 2009 21:56 (Yesterday)

I feel like bringing a book into bar would be like asking for middle school style nerd-taunting all over again. It might be totally irrational, and I might meet great people who are no longer 12 and stupid, but I absolutely wouldn't have the nerve. Maybe that explains the scarcity.

the older i get, the more my worst fears are confirmed about adults basically still being 12 and stupid. sometimes i have a "please don't be an asshole, please don't be an asshole" mantra that i whisper to myself in anticipation of an encounter with someone who might (or might not) be an asshole.

As an unofficial charter member of I Love Books I hereby declare that I love books! Message sent. Received?

I wasn't reading at a bar, rather an outdoor cafe, but one that is rather breezy and boozy. I was reading the Financier by Theodore Dreiser. I wouldn't even want to talk to me to ask what it was about, and yet, someone tried. He asked what I was reading an that said that he'd read Angels and Demons and The Alchemist. As I smiled weakly he asked if I'd like to get together sometime to talk about books. "No thanks," was my reply.

Was that a short story? Maybe I should print it out and read it in a bar.

Love reading in bars, don't want to be talked to, people who ask "Is that book good?" or "What's it about?" need to die.

Actually sometimes I'll take my most embarrassing books to read in public on purpose, like, no one can accuse me of trying to be cool if I'm reading a giant fantasy novel with a lurid cover while drinking cheap booze somewhere with few people. It's like the anti- anti- anti- of everything that max rounded up and shot a few posts ago.

the fact is i hate people who read at bars because i love to read at bars

Have you tried hitting on them?

How about you just read where you want to read and not give a shit what people think about it?

Well, yes, but what I want to read is usually a silly-looking genre novel.

^^^reminds me of the time some older woman asked me about the PKD novel I was reading ("Galactic Pot Healer") on my lunch break and I couldn't tell if she was hitting on me or not

"that's an interesting title"

what do you say to that

"you got a nice set of pots, baby, can I heal them for you?"

you forgot to type galactic

the conversation was taking place in outerspace, so, no i didn't

One time I was reading in a bar, waiting for Laurel, and this was an actually ridiculous reading in a bar scenario, beacuse it was at Union Pool on a Saturday night, and the place was packed to the gills, still nothing about my reading technique suggested, please ask me what I am reading, and yet someone did. "Did you really come to a bar to read?!" I answered, "I'm waiting for a friend," which was perhaps the wrong answer, because it appeared like somewhat of an opening in retrospect. I think I was reading a children's book.

You just make friends wherever you go, VP. Must be all that smiling you do.

i asked a girl about the mike davis book she was reading on the train a while back and she responded as if to have a conversation-on-the-train, but i really just wanted to know if the book was worth reading. not that she was unattractive or anything.

i've come to enjoy reading fiction the last few years, partly due to sharing the book-reading experience with another(s). but almost everything i've read has been new fiction about characters and/or places i can identify with in some respect and maybe i should branch out more.

i don't read in bars, but i might be comfortable doing so if i were more of a bar person in general. then again, i do my best reading on subways/trains (but not planes - too busy looking out the window or sleeping) - there's something about the movement that helps.

One should only read for pleasure, no?

― Bud Huxtable (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, June 6, 2009 2:36 PM (3 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is very otm, unless you have to read something for school

Not sure about that, unless you make the concept of pleasure elastic enough to include reading stuff that isn't particularly enjoyable as such, but that you are reading because you are interested in the subject, or feel this particular book fills a lack of knowledge that you want.

Which makes it sort of meaningless.

unless you make the concept of pleasure elastic enough to include reading stuff that isn't particularly enjoyable as such, but that you are reading because you are interested in the subject, or feel this particular book fills a lack of knowledge that you want

yeah, my concept of reading for pleasure includes this kind of stuff

Ok. Often that sort of reading can be agonising tho. I still bear mental scars from an incredibly dull book on medieval Germany. Unnecessarily dull, in fact.

surely the answer to that is "find a better book about medieval Germany"

Quite. But I was just looking at the whole 'reading only for pleasure' thing. I read because I want to most of hte time, but sometimes I read when I don't want to, because I've got out of the habit, because I fancy something mentally punitive (bit fucked up that one - but makes sense to me), sometimes because I feel I ought to read something.

None of those really fit into my idea of reading for pleasure, it's more not being able to stand not reading, if that's not too runic.

because I fancy something mentally punitive

I'm not British, but if you fancy something doesn't that mean that you like it???

True! Although I do wonder about the whole British taste for things which aren't actually pleasant - at least it seems British although it could just be me. Bitter, sour things, physical and mental.

Even so, there's a taste for the idea of something that when it comes down to it isn't actually very pleasurable. I guess, er, that's probably when I put the book down, not always tho.

I hope there aren't any more 'hte' errors in this post - the box goes off the edge of my screen.

"I'm not British, but..."

You just make friends wherever you go, VP. Must be all that smiling you do.

I do not smile when I read! Unless I'm reading Nathaniel West or something.

Last antidote:

I was coming home on the train, and reading a classic children's novel--I forget which one. The guy next to me said, "Why are reading that?!" and I explained that I was a children's librarian etc. People feel the need to interrogate me when I am reading. He then told me about his career as a film writer.

should've answered that you were "into kids"

i would have given him the finger

moving to a city where i hardly know anyone = best thing that's happened to my reading schedule

I feel like bringing a book into bar would be like asking for middle school style nerd-taunting all over again. It might be totally irrational, and I might meet great people who are no longer 12 and stupid, but I absolutely wouldn't have the nerve. Maybe that explains the scarcity.

hahaha last time I read at a bar I got totally taunted by the cocktail waitress of all people. But she asked me 'why are you reading something at a sixth grade reading level?' I was reading this:

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/images/n2/n11922.jpg

It was Bizarro-world version of the Bill Hicks bit about the Waffle House waitress.

DP = my hero

He's amazing! Gave me a Dada obsession when I was 14 or 15.

why are you reading something at a sixth grade reading level?'

The funny thing about this--Pinkwater is probably actually on a higher reading level than your garden-variety adult bestseller.

^^^yep

once again, portland gets things right:

http://twitter.com/LibraryHours