Revolutionary reading development here…
I’m slowing things down.
Reading Middlemarch changed me: it gave me back the pleasure of slow reading. I’m so very grateful for that.
The edition I read was 912 pages in length, and it’s rare that I read such a long book. And I feel like I’ve lost my patience and attention span. But I really haven’t; I just haven’t exercised them enough.
It also makes me realize the downside of tracking my reading: the gamification effect that makes me want to add more books to my Done list. Sometimes I feel like I just want to read books to finish them to get on to the next. And that’s sad, my friends. I don’t want to live that way.
So Middlemarch was a wake-up call. A long, meandering, 3-month-long wake-up call. It gave me back my identity as an absorbed, contented reader of big, long books that take their time.
And now I’m going to try to keep that part of my reading life alive — to keep reading long books and to slow down my reading when the book warrants close attention.
I’ll be returning to Ron Chernow’s Grant and maybe, upon a friend’s recommendation, picking up A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain.
And now it’s an official announcement, and we’ll see how I do.
How about you? Anyone else had a reading revelation?
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