on not being able to read

attention

it gets harder the oldr you get! unless you retire

it's a combo of school/internet, i believe. the same thing happened to me: i graduated over the (nz) summer and just had total book burn-out.

my advice: start with short stories.

and fun genre shit

don't sweat it. this has been happening to me all summer. i go in waves with reading though. never ever feel guilty about not finishing a book. you should always associate reading with delight, someone wise once said. you just gotta find the right book Hoos.

i've started like, four or five books this summer but haven't finished them. i've read a lot of other ones, too, but the cumulative effect of so many started but unfinished is grating sometimes but fuck, sometimes you just don't click with a book.

That is truly shitty and happens to me occasionally. I switch to crosswords when I can't be bothered to read..

read before bed

i hoped this thread would be the text equivalent of this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W23-2Lg_3fU

this has totally utterly happened to me, lol english lit degree

as said elsewhere i'm taking the nuclear cure, gravity's rainbow

(as opposed to the thermonuclear one, finnegans wake)

why do people only feel guilty about this? do you beat yourself up if you don't finish a whole album?

nah but i do feel guilty if i don't watch a movie until the end (or at least a lack of closure).

no but i do beat myself up if i don't finish a whole sandwich

do you beat off if you can't finish a whole hj

I don't watch a lot of movies, but when I do it's on dvd, and I usually watch them in fast-forward, only stopping when there's something funny-looking or otherwise interesting. o/w they take too long to watch given how many other cool things there are to do. I do the same with albums as I'm getting to know them. But it's hard to do this with fiction and get anything out of it.

I don't watch a lot of movies, but when I do it's on dvd, and I usually watch them in fast-forward, only stopping when there's something funny-looking or otherwise interesting.

this is weird

maybe you don't like movies and shouldn't watch them?

it is weird! but actually watching them this way works pretty well for me. It's true I am no connoisseur of film.

i usually read books by flipping the pages pretty fast, only stopping when a word is funny-looking or otherwise interesting.

lol I know this makes me look an idiot

i just think that successful reading requires practice -- my pace of reading, ease of comprehension, and general level of enjoyment all improve if i've been reading consistently. if i've been out of practice it feel like a chore but the adjustment period is always brief.

but yeah sometimes i'll go 3 or 4 months without cracking a book and when i do i'll get hung up reading the same paragraph over and over without absorbing it

Dude, you were just an English major. Marathon ingestion of mad novels/etc of all sorts. I would reckon it's BURNOUT, which happened to me for about 1.5 yrs after I quit being an English major. (I think Pamela was the last straw.) A friend gave me a copy of The Master & Margarita for my birthday in...2007? And it was awesome and made novels not seem like a Sisyphean ordeal. But I've read maybe two or three in the year since then.

Don't get mad if you read it real slow. Don't get mad if you don't want to. I find graphic novels to be an excellent palette cleanser (that and they are fucking awesome). Maybe you could try that? Public libraries have TONS of them. Murakami's short story collections, I tore through those too.

I thought this thread would be about illiteracy, which reminded me of what I thought was the most heartbreaking scene in Heartbreak Soup, Gil Hernandez graphic novel. Heraclio, a teacher & probably the most book-learnt dude in their impoverished town, has really maddened his wife in various ways. He leaves the house and, never really having learned to read, his wife tries to pick up one of the Gabriel Garcia-Marquez books Heraclio's always big-upping. She tries sounding out the first page, then puts the book down & starts crying.

This phenomenon is what prompted me to start this thread, btw:

Recommend me books that aren't heavy and don't require a lot of concentration

start taking the train to work

there were a couple good threads on ILB about this but i can't find them

hmmm I don't think I've ever had this problem. I'm usually reading two books at any given time - sometimes the pace varies but I can't remember the last time I was not reading any books whatsoever. when I'm on vacation/travelling is when I tend to plow through stuff.

(right now I'm reading the Letters of the Younger Pliny and KRS' "Red Mars")

why do people only feel guilty about this? do you beat yourself up if you don't finish a whole album?

-- and what, Thursday, August 14, 2008 3:26 PM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

u are no ex-catholic ive ever heard of

jk otm, so is max
a long commute (not driving) is the best way to get back into reading
whenever i forgot my book id have to resort to playing cell phone tetris :-/

Reader's Block
how do you get over reader's block?

Euler: do you watch films with subtitles? I recall my brother doing the same thing on VHS. Whenever he got bored with a film, he just started fast-forwarding and following the plot through the subtitles, occasionally stopping to leer at women or click his tongue at particularly fine explosions.

hahaaa

i used to be pretty adamant about finishing books i'd started. then a couple of years ago i was reading barry hannah's yonder stands your orphan and I was just like fuck this, life's too short.

Øystein I do often watch with subtitles! and the sorts of scenes you describe are the ones I'm drawn to. Basically I spend my days thinking/reading/writing, and so I want to spend my nights not thinking. But the dumb films I end up watching have lots of filler.

write to hollywood and complain!!

I was also an English major and other than a brief period immediately post-graduation and pre-employment when I re-read a bunch of Stephen King novels, I haven't been able to complete a novel or non-fiction book in the past year.

I will however, recommend PLAYS. I don't know much about contemporary playwrights, but I picked up a few of the Greeks tragedians and they made for breezy reading on the morning commute.

I don't expect to get much free time from here on out. I guess that college was the time to really indulge this pastime of mine and hopefully get something out of it.

lol no, I love compressing dumb movies down to their essence

I don't understand this whole "not finishing books" issue - I mean, I would think you could tell if a book is going to be worth your time within the first few pages.

but you could have 100% dumb, none of those pesky unfunny boring bits like people talking or a guy walking somewhere or a whole unexploded car or a breast covered with fabric

xp

I had a roommate who watched movies with Christopher Walken, but only the parts he was in, which means I have seen about 10 minutes of "The Country Bears." This was mostly okay, but I REALLY wanted her to watch Annie Hall – I knew she'd like it – but she insisted on watching only the ~2 minutes he's in.

as said elsewhere i'm taking the nuclear cure, gravity's rainbow

Ha, I'm reading that at the moment as well. Although I have misplaced the book and haven't been able to find it the last two days. Unless... have you stolen my copy, Jagg3r you bastard?

Also, I highly recommend Finnegans Wake. It's an amazing book, and if you're worried about not finishing it you can always spend a week on two pages and not get bored.

a lot of great books can be difficult to get through sometimes. i dont think its THAT weird. the weird part is feeling guilty about it

PS, anyone want to recommend some good plays for reading?

xpost that's why I mostly play video games

Everyone recommending Finnegan's Wake, whereas my idea of an accomplishment this summer is finishing a whole issue of Harper's.

I read Euripides' Bacchae (play) last week and it was fucking awesome

but she insisted on watching only the ~2 minutes he's in.

looool

you still have to walk your guy places in video games, you need like a fucking college degree to understand GTA geography

near the end of college (lol english major) i just could not wait to finish so that i could read whatever i wanted to, instead of stuff for class. it's still pretty cool.

i hate unexploded cars

it's true, and gets frustrating; I am stalled at about 20% into gta4 for those reasons

another former english major here. i used to inhale books, now i like taking my time with them. i prefer to wait until i can concentrate with a clear head, rather than just going at it in 5-minute bursts on short train rides and in restaurants. i also don't feel too bad if i buy a book but don't start it right away -- sometimes i just have to be in the right mood, or "ready" if you will.

Personally I don't pay any attention to my own life unless something interesting or funny is happening. Sometimes I accidentally concentrate and somebody is always saying Adam will you get this for me or I am in traffic or something, and it is totally lame.

a lot of great books can be difficult to get through sometimes. i dont think its THAT weird.

right I don't disagree here I guess I just don't understand the putting the book down and never finishing it... I mean, what's the rush? if its rough but rewarding, just take your time with it. I guess its the finality of "I will never finish this book!" that is weird to me.

those cross-country treks in GTA: San Andreas were a bigger slog than even the heaviest of books.

After years of being disappointed by my under-reading and half-reading I've become fairly voracious of late, averaging about a novel a week in addition to a couple of hours of philosophy and other academicish reading most days. I think what's urged me on is my newfound unemployed, not studying, hand-to-mouth lifestyle. Being driven insane by having nothing to do was pretty good encouragement to do something, it seems.

I hope that in the future we have the technology to compress boring days into just the fun parts

really, I don't know why we bother!

When I was a kid and didn't want to finish a book, I'd feel really guilty. I got my way around this by telling myself that when I died and went to heaven, the book would be up there and I could just finish it then.

wait there was a shitty adam sandler movie about this

x-post

They need to invent something that you can look at all day instead of working, something that delivers funny animal pictures and games and lets you talk shit with people for hours about nothing at all.

nah, it'd never fly

yeah, it should also fly. and do tricks.

It should be like a parrot with a screen and keyboard attached

i just can't see a market for it

Euler you sound like you have ADD

lol I'm just playing with you guys

wait what did you say?

Yeah I mean basically what it come down to is that I have a stack of books on the nightstand that I'm intending to read this year (one of my goals was "Read Continuously"), but as I start new books and leave them unfinished the pile grows and it's like "oh man I'm suddenly feeling pressured to catch up on this leisure activity wtf"

wtf

near the end of college (lol english major) i just could not wait to finish so that i could read whatever i wanted to, instead of stuff for class. it's still pretty cool.

-- Jordan, Thursday, August 14, 2008 9:02 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

yeah this is basically where i was at

i read 6 novels in the month of june for my very last compressed american lit class and then it was like "finally i can read sacred games and all these other books" and then i couldn't

reading has been *required* for me in some sense since i started reading! i never really did a lot of leisure reading as a kid, and even as i got older my leisure reading was born out of this sense of responsibility of "writers are supposed to read"

i guess i need to fuckin decompress for a while or something then i'll go re-read dark knight returns and see how i feel then.

i used to inhale books, now i like taking my time with them. i prefer to wait until i can concentrate with a clear head, rather than just going at it in 5-minute bursts on short train rides and in restaurants. i also don't feel too bad if i buy a book but don't start it right away -- sometimes i just have to be in the right mood, or "ready" if you will.

^^^

Reader's Block

Reading Block vs Writing Block?

I think I am going to reread American Psycho. Lord knows why. Point, tho: if you like rereading books, sitting down with an old one that strikes your memory is a good way to jumpstart...regular? reading.

This happened to me for ages. I only got out of it properly when I started 2x45-minute daily bus commute and took books along. Helps that I'm too lazy to unpack my bag every night, or I'd probably swap the unfinished book out. Also I am glad for cheap books from charity shops so I don't fret too much about whether I'm damaging them, because that wrecks my attention too.

On the wider problem of feeling pressurised (by yrself and/or the idea of e.g. Well-Read People Who Would Laugh At You for not having done it more, better) into spending your free time in ways you value, well, tell us if you find a fix, cz I miss the days when all free time was spent learning new stuff or making music, but I'm too hung up on wishing I could learn stuff or be creative to be able to do so.

Also, damn you internets, you are more enticingly immediate and soothing than investing time into any grand schemes of self-improvement. And my reading comprehension skills have severely decayed since you came along. Cannot stop eyes darting all over page, refusing to finish sentences or absorb sense before skipping ahead!

last time i finished a novel = too scarily long ago to mention in public

Bad manners of replying to own post: so, yeah, another successful short-term fix was when the home computer last broke. Got through a lot of books that week.

Or light trashy fiction with 3-page-long chapters (so you could put it down any time, except you don't, because they all end on a cliffhanger and you go "ohh... just 3 more pages and I'll know what's happened") and car chases and explosions and other such Hollywood plot structure shit, e.g. Max Barry's "Jennifer Government", which I was too embarrassed to mention on the Abbott thread where everyone else was going "yeah, when I am feeling restless and brain-stunted I like to breeze through a stack of Borges, Calvino, Perec".

(I love those guys - well, Borges and Perec certainly - but I have to work hard at resisting my temptation to skip through long paragraphs or I get totally lost, which is not good when I have to read 150-word album reviews six times to extract any meaning, as I did repeatedly on this morning's journey).

I just bought SEVEN books yesterday for £2 each! I am unwilling to take bets on how many I'll actually read, because the answer will hurt.

Who would like to be first to point out the irony of my combined shortcomings at reading long-form text and at keeping my own readably brief?

I've probably only finished 15 books in the last decade.

I've been reading five pages per day. I blame two kids and sleep deprivation and tennis and the Shield and Scrabble and... and... and...

Sir Hoos the Large, Driver of Steens, I would not fret about your recent inability to finish a novel. You will not forget how to read. It is a skill, not a goal.

The chances are quite good that your hand is not picking up the kind of books that your mind requires. Since you do not as yet know what kind of book that will be until you encounter it, I would suggest browsing in completely different parts of the library or bookstore than you habitually browse in, randomly sampling books that have vaguely interesting titles or covers. See what happens. It can't hurt you.

a passing spacecadet, I feel. you. Have you played that online game that's based on Jennifer Government? I forget what it is.

I tried looking for a thread about this recently to vent my frustration. I've only read two books all summer(Tender is the Night, The Member of the Wedding) and I enjoyed both of them more than any other books I've read in about forever, but I can't seem to read all the other books I've been enthusing over. In fact I've bought a ridiculous amount of books recently considering how little I've read, which is bothering me even more!

I know that when I fall for a book as much as I fell for these two I usually get put off reading for a little while until the spell of them is broken, but this is ridiculous.