I find that the length of time it takes me to read a book varies wildly, seemingly independent of the 'difficulty' or length of the book. Some take months, some take a few days. The more enjoyable a book, the more engrossed I get and the quicker the time seems to fly by. What's interesting is that this is very subjective - I know of people who have taken a long time to read a book that has taken me a short time, but have taken a short time to read something that took me a long time.
What books took you a very long/short time to read? Do you think that we should give up on books if they start to drag on, or persist even if it means reading fewer books? Is it even worthwhile to think of reading as an achievement?
I'd like to hear your opinions.
EDIT: Thanks for your responses! It was interesting to read these comments, especially given the variety of responses and different points of view.
It really depends on how much of the content or expression I care to absorb. For example, it's taken me about a year to finish half of A Thousand Plateaus partly because I take rigorous notes and find the implications so reeling that I have to take breaks from time to time. Ulysses took me about two weeks, but I was spending hours per day engrossed in it, meaning that the jump from everyday conversation to the language in the book wasn't happening; the better primed you are for a genre, it seems, the easier it is to trudge through it. I definitely think it was a milestone, not only in my reading, but in my attention span. I'd guess an 80% comprehension of content, but the expression was just too good to let go of. Currently I'm reading Nietzsche and Philosophy. If my estimates are right, I will have completed it in ten days. Since I'm familiar with the style of the author, it's easier to plan and think ahead and to find the main points. This certainly helps, particularly in fiction that is formulaic (The Magic Treehouse series, one that I read in my childhood, comes to mind). But again, on priming: I think that, on one hand, if you read a similar (fuzzy) genre in sequence, it makes it easier to critique and look into the details. On the other, everybody has their limits. For example, reading ten non-fiction books on climate change written for a general audience will at some point become too repetitious to bear. In my view, it is best to approach a book as you would a transit map, in order to see what line you should transfer to, or what stop you should get off at. Selective reading is good. Reading to put yourself to sleep is pointless. ---- Specifically on your questions:
1) Brave New World took me a day, but a similar length book, The Uses of Pessimism took me six. One was made to be easy to digest, the other was challenging in terms of my own ideology. 2) Reading books is not a competition. You can read any number of books. My mother has a collection of Steven King books in the dozens, but there is not the intellectual challenge, I think, in the fewer books that I read. 3) I think it is best to view reading (so be it, lists) as a demarcation of your literacy. The CIA World Fact Book claims a 99.6% literacy rate here in the US (last I checked), but that statistic does not consider the depth of field of the recognition of letters; it may only consider basic, basic understanding of the alphabet and how to pronounce words. It other words it is the meta-linguistic knowledge of what to gain from a book, versus how to merely sound it out, that is the true literacy. If you are interested in what I'm saying here, I would suggest this book: How to Read a Book
I completely agree with your idea of priming in relation to our capacity to read books. I've found that when one is reading books from either the same genre, the same author or same philosophical inquiry-one reads them much faster because, evidently, one knows what to expect and one has already internalized the internal logic or language. That's why I think it's particularly important to read all of the books one can acquire of an important or preferred philosopher/theorist, since the language can sometimes be vague or imprecise. The more works one reads of said author, the more understanding one will gleam from them, and the quicker one will do so.
Depends. Right now I've been at Herman Melville's Typee for a couple of months now. I could read Ulysses faster than I'm reading Typee. Before starting that I was reading Murakami's Norweigan Wood and went through that in a couple of days, and during the interim I read a work entitled "A Wanderer Plays on Muted Strings", which is a badass title btw, by Knut Hamsum, which was pretty decent, although the contents weren't as badass as the title. I read that in two-ish days. It's not that Typee is a bad book (It's a good book) but sometimes there are books you just read in a sitting no matter the page number then there are books that you make excuses to avoid reading, not out of hatred or anything but just that other things start looking more interesting. Typee is in the latter category. Ulysses the first time took me a few months, but every other rereading gets faster and faster, only slowing down to annotate my book with all of the references. That's really the nasty part of Ulysses: It doesn't end when you finish it, because now you got all these shitton of references that you have to research because they actually are interesting. Joyce you motherfucker. I love you. I can't wait for June to do it aaaaaallllllllllll over again. People should give up on books if they feel they should give up on them. I've had this argument before. I'm more or less of the camp of always finishing a book I read, after reading and watching movies that I wasn't too big into and then by the end I was left with my foot in my mouth (Eraserhead!). But it doesn't matter. There are more books in the world than we have time to read them, and everyone has different reactions to books. I don't think the great books are the end all be all just because a lot of people like Dante and reference him. Maybe they like them, but someone who doesn't shouldn't really have to sit through it just because others did. Find what you like and enjoy. I read Mein Kampf once. That was perhaps the only book I never finished and never will finish. I had a hundred pages to go and I just could not go any longer. I barely remember anything except a lot of frustration at trying to read the book for more than a few minutes. It might have been the translation but I hear from many that the translation doesn't matter. Hitler could not write for shit. I still have the book. I often second-guess myself at times and wonder if maybe now if I read it it'll be different, but I know. I know. I should probably finish Typee. I only have about a hundred pages to go. That in theory takes perhaps about two hours for me. Less than that even. But every time I say that and then try to read it I am faced with the incontrovertible truth of Hofstadter's law. Reading as an achievement? ...I never cared about it. I only started to read because I was faced with a kind of crisis where I decided I wanted to change myself. I started reading anything I could get my hands on. Found out about many authors and Project Gutenberg. Found out about the Western Canon and enjoyed a lot of stuff from there, while also still enjoying things out of the canon and just read anything that sounds interesting to me. I mean, in a way I read Ulysses every year just to say that I do, but also because I genuinely enjoy that book. Wanting challenges and goals to achieve isn't wrong, but don't make it all that matters. Enjoy yourself.
Too long in my opinion. There is so much knowledge and fun hidden in all the books that exist, and it mostly annoys me how long it takes me to read them. Granted, I read everything in English rather than in my native language (unless it's a German book of course), but I'm having a hard time chewing through the Feast for Crows novel, despite finding it interesting. On the other hand, I could casually read the first Hunger Games book in a couple of evenings. I have a huge reading backlog, because of the many recommendations I get, and I'm sure I would never run out of interesting books to read in my entire lifetime, yet it takes me ages to finish books sometimes, even if I like to read them. One of the reasons is that I can't read for a long time in one go, I prefer reading a chapter and then doing something else, maybe 2-3 chapters (depending on length) or more, but very rarely and only if it's super engaging. Another reason being that my reading speed feels really slow, especially when I can't shut off my inner voice, which slows you down drastically. But it's also a bit my own fault, because I don't really take my time for reading, with all the games to play and series or movies to watch nowadays. I'm sure at least that will change in the future.
One word: Audiobooks. I listen to them while driving. I listen to them while riding my bike. I listen to them while wiring racks. I listen to them while cleaning house. And I listen to them at 1.5x. I rarely have time to sit down and read a book. but the bike ride down to Torrance and back will get me three hours of something - which, with a book like Rendezvous with Rama is 3/8ths of the thing.
My favorite audio book has to be The Dark Tower series. I listened to it in NYC over the course of a couple years. You forget how an hour or two walking / subway adds up. George Guidall read first two. His voice was like magic. I still get flashbacks sometimes. Like right now. I listen to a section of that and I'm walking back through Brooklyn in the middle of the summer and I can smell NYC again. Then, Frank Muller took over. He just takes it to a whole new level.
My wedding coincided nicely with the Swine Flu panic. And I had my one and only zombie apocalypse script to write. So instead of having a bachelor party, I took the 1 from Santa Monica Blvd to Astoria in my Dodge Stealth, taking it as slow as I wanted. Ended up taking five days. I listened to the Left Behind series the whole way. Fantasy might be graded on a curve, but it's a whole 'nuther hyperbola from the Jesus stuff. Man, what a bunch of stinkers.
Well, I named my daughter after a character in Game of Thrones, so it's probably not a genre problem. That said, I would say that fantasy is graded more easily than sci fi, and sci fi gets softballed. My problem with The Hobbit is it was a lot of singing and dancing and funny languages and twee little things that had nothing to do with plot or characterization. That's my beef with Tolkien - he was all about "here are things that are cool with the scarcest of plots to tie them together." Dragon Slayer had more plot than the Hobbit and it was like 75 minutes long. This is why Wizard of Earthsea is so awesome for Fantasy - problems are grappled with. Issues are posed. Characters arc. People grow up. It's what I love about the Game of Thrones books - they're filled with real people facing real problems in real ways. It's the classic Star Trek vs. Star Wars problem: Star Trek was Wagon Train, tromping through space and solving a new problem every week. Star Wars was a samurai film with hyperspace. I think it's because people writing fantasy don't really feel obligated to do anything with it. It's a damn shame. When you've got all of magic to work with, you'd think you'd be able to come up with something compelling.
Dude, I seriously fell asleep during the end of Return of the King, woke up 20 minutes later, and the ending was still happening. I'm pretty sure the wrap up was like 45 minutes or something. It at least felt that way. I guess that's not really Tolkien's fault, but if the book reads anywhere as slow as the film, I can't believe so many people have gotten through it. I saw Hobbit 1, but fuck if you could get me back in the theater to see parts 2 and 3.That's my beef with Tolkien - he was all about "here are things that are cool with the scarcest of plots to tie them together."
It's a rich, enveloping environment. Arthur C Clarke is similar - he doesn't give the first fuck about his characters but he's all about where you are. An Arthur C Clarke novel is like a protracted article in Conde Nast Traveler for a place that doesn't exist. Tolkien, on the other hand, is a protracted article in National Geographic without the pictures.
Lol. This is what I love about the movies themselves. That they are so very long in unwinding. I feel like I'm watching a painting that I enjoy looking at, and the movies themselves gave me a similar feeling as when I read War and Peace in a way.Dude, I seriously fell asleep during the end of Return of the King, woke up 20 minutes later, and the ending was still happening.
That will of course backfire if you're one of the 14 vocal Malazan apologists currently alive. Yeah, I mean an argument can be made that Tolkien shone when he wrote mythology rather than fantasy. His fantasy is famously (literally) black and white, but his mythology is much more complicated. The Silmarillion has tragic heroes, characters with shades of grey to them, moral issues. Lord of the Rings has the best telling of the hero's journey archetype ever written, but the bad guys are the bad guys. Tolkien knew all this and didn't mind too much. -- Haven't read Earthsea, oddly, but that's an accurate portrayal of Game of Thrones. I enjoy it for that reason, although it's a grind and I don't exactly consider it fantasy. Fantasy is often about escapism and frankly, fuck escaping into A Song of Ice and Fire. I'll take real life. We may have found something upon which you agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky.That said, I would say that fantasy is graded more easily than sci fi, and sci fi gets softballed.
Boy oh boy do I agree with this. Got 400 interchangeable characters with names that hold no meaningful linguistic pattern? Words for the sake of words? No plot exposition until book three because True Fans of the genre will have stuck around that long and no one else matters? Must be a shining example of the fantasy genre. Malazan, looking at you.My problem with The Hobbit is it was a lot of singing and dancing and funny languages and twee little things that had nothing to do with plot or characterization. That's my beef with Tolkien - he was all about "here are things that are cool with the scarcest of plots to tie them together." Dragon Slayer had more plot than the Hobbit and it was like 75 minutes long.
When you've got all of magic to work with, you'd think you'd be able to come up with something compelling.
Best description I've heard for Game of Thrones is it's The Sopranos set in Middle Earth. I think it's disingenuous to argue GoT isn't fantasy - it's got dragons, foxfire, spellcasters and wights. The fact that Dragons = WMD, foxfire = chemical weapons, spellcasters = radical Islam and wights = global warming doesn't change the fact that you've got direct plot elements revolving around things that don't exist. Read Earthsea. They're kids books. You'll crank through them in a coffee break. Ursula LeGuin essentially wrote all of Harry Potter in 56,000 words in 1968. And she wrote it about Pacific Islanders.
Agreed. A friend of mine I won't name has been working on a novel that became a story arc that became a series of novels that became a universe, none of which have been released. Creating an imaginary world is certainly a good idea, but 99% of the time it does bugger all for the quality of the novel - usually making it worse, as the story is continually disrupted to retell backstory upon backstory. Unfortunately, I think that this has created a stereotypical idea of fantasy novels, which means the good stories don't get the attention they deserve (unless they are made into hit TV shows). I like the mythology angle that you presented. Series like Discworld take another good approach - very complex mythical world, but it feels like it grew organically as the series progressed, it doesn't feel like it was all planned top-down when the series started. Places that were just referred to in one-line jokes were later fleshed out as Pratchett pleased.
You think the contrast had to do with the author's use of language as well? I have not read much King, but I remember reading Eyes of the Dragon by him in some ridiculously short period of time. It was like cutting butter with an appropriately heated knife, and I didn't even like it that much. For some reason though, I couldn't get It to hold my interest, though I remember it leaving the same impression language-wise. Just very accessible and quick. Like you don't need an oar when you're reading him.
No, 'cuz I cranked through Watership Down with no issues and its language is just as byzantine, the concepts just as foreign, and the conceit of "elven languages" is front and center. Watership Down, however, was an exploration of society, religion, mortality and warfare as seen through the eyes of rabbits as opposed to "a bunch of dudes go slay a dragon." Stephen King wordsmiths a lot. His rule of thumb is to leave 20% on the cutting room floor between first and second draft. It makes a difference.
For me, things like the elven languages didn't read so much as conceit as eccentricity and individual passion. I guess conceit is actually a good description in the sense that it felt like Tolkien was doing it because he loved it, without regard for the reception as much (not that he had to worry it turns out, -he had an audience). He was on his own jam, that's for sure. I appreciate that, but tbh, the end result is I skipped some of that shit. I don't care if it's an Elvish ballad, Ishmael's cetological aspirations, or Rand's Galt taking 60 pages to do what the rest of the novel was already doing, but a thousand times more boring...I reserve the right to hit the space-bar.its language is just as byzantine, the concepts just as foreign, and the conceit of "elven languages" is front and center.
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip." - Elmore Leonard I read this two weeks ago and ended up nuking a 5800 word chapter down to 1800 words. In the script it had been important to have this big bolus of exposition because I only had 110 pp double spaced to work with. Following the script, that chapter was where the big bolus existed. But in the novel I'd been able to work it in without any effort or exposition whatsoever - it was all first person discovery. Fuckin' liberating - The book went from 192k to 187k in an afternoon.
If it's any kind narrative (biography or fiction or whatever), I generally whiz along at ~200-225 pages per two hours as I gradually cease reading, and my imagination takes over... eventually, it's like I'm watching a movie, and it only stops when I reach the last page. If it's nonfiction, it really varies. It took me months to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, due to the heavy subject matter and the enormous amount of information. If it's a textbook or academic paper, it may take me several minutes per paragraph, due to the necessity of grasping the concept before moving on. In terms of persisting, I found it worthwhile to keep trying to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, even though I probably missed out on reading easier fiction.
Depending on the book, a few days to a week. I tend to really get into reading moods where I'll knock out whole series in a few days like a Netflix binge. Books like Dune, The Dresden Files, and I just started The Gaea Trilogy go down pretty smooth. I can definitely understand giving up on a book if its not interesting to you. Sue me, but it takes a pretty strong recommendation to get me to read a book if it doesn't hook me in the first few chapters (for novels) or at least be a topic I'm interested in. I've never really thought of reading as an achievement, but the comprehension of the material and being able to analyze the parts of the book are something I find amusing more than just the story.
I can knock out a thousand pages in a few day or two hundred pages can take me weeks depending on the difficulty of the material and more importantly how engaged I am in it. I just started Jawaharlal Nehru's (first prime minister of India) "Glimpses of World History," which he wrote while in various prisons in the 30's. All the chapters were letters written to educate his daughter in the history of the world. It's informal and seems to reveal as much about the author as it will world history. I think it'll take me a few weeks to push through all 600 pagess, might stop and read something else inbetween.
It's dependent on what's going on in my life. If I have a lot of projects going on and am trying to read a book at the same time it's going to take me months, but if I actually just sit down and read a book at lunch or what you have you a few weeks is usually what it takes. This is excluding certain books like Gravity's Rainbow, which I own but just can't devote the time to getting through multiple times to understand it. What I've read of it fantastic though.
Totally depends. Gödel, Escher, Bach took me at least a good six months; Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance took a few weeks.
I have started Gödel, Escher, Bach three times now. I've yet to make it all the way though. I hate books that are supposedly fantastic, must-reads but can't hold my attention for more than a few days. It feels like the horribly naggy ex-girlfriend of failure.
If it's any consolation, it took me two years to finally finish that book. You can get a large part out of the book by just reading the dialogues if you are good at interpreting metaphors. Coincidentally, I was just in a presentation yesterday where the presenter went on a tangent to talk about that book!
There are a great many "great books" that are abject bullshit. Robert Persig, for example, knew jack shit about zen and knew jack shit about motorcycle maintenance (favorite part of the book: where he runs out of gas then realizes that his motorcycle, like every bike ever made, has a reserve tank in lieu of a gas gage). I was incapable of reading the Cliff's Notes for anything Jane Austen.
Some books take me too long! A song of ice and fire, those books take too long! There is so much detail, specially in how all the characters are connected and related, it kind of sucks my energy when I read because I have to concentrate on those things. Check out family trees and the map of Westeros. For books that I read fast, I have a fun story :) I was able to measure how good my german was becoming in "amount of days needed to finish harry potter book". The first book took me about 2-3 months as I was just starting to read german books. The last book was 2 days. I was chewing through those pages as if was my last day! :)
Quite a while usually. Other stuff takes priority over reading, like listening to music and hanging out with people and doing work, so I read whenever I get the chance or have nothing else to do. I'll say it takes a couple months on average for me to finish a book. Ditto for TV series.