ask meme!

[queenlua]

stealing a meme from necrophilia:

So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me, something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about, or something you've always been curious about but have never asked, or something completely silly that you'd like me to answer for kicks. No limits on the range of questions, either: ask me anything you want to know about, whether it's a fannish opinion or a question about a fic of mine or trivia about my real life or my thoughts on events in the offline world.

Ask away. ♥

(my answers might, uh, take a few days *stares at Friday deadline for a thing* but feel free to ask away in the meantime!)

Comments

[queenlua]

haha! nah, not presumptuous at all. i'm actually a bit on the slow side, as a reader (at least compared to what readinglength.com generally estimates), but i do end up reading a decent amount anyway, and i actually sort of... had to fall back into the habit, sometime after college? (like many hedonistic youths, i uh, might've spent the year after graduation mostly partying and definitely not reading, lol)

anyway, when i got back into it, here's the stuff that helped:

* i'm pretty ruthless about ditching books the second they bore me. the problem with pushing through to the end of a boring book out of a completionist urge isn't that you're bored while doing it (though you are); it's just that if you do it too often, you start associating reading in general with boredom, which sucks! in particular, i went through a period where i just plain stopped reading anything for a while because i read four entirely awful books in a row. don't do that! just throw that shit in the garbage!

* similarly, if i do make the error of reading an awful book, i try to have some "go-tos" that i know will be delightful (rereads of old favorites, or else a new book by an author who i consistently like), and read one of those right after.

* curating a list of books that sound interesting, constantly asking trusted friends "what's your favorite book," finding books by author that your favorite authors like, etc, is very helpful, since then when you're in the mood to read something like [x] you can just look at the massive handy-dandy list you've built up. personal recommendations and recs from niche blogs are going to be much more interesting books on average, anyway—it turns out i kind of hate, uh, a lot of the stuff that's popular in mainstream sff nowadays (read: the stuff that's hyped up on the Tor front page), but, i've been pretty successful at finding the gems and avoiding the stuff i hate.

* also, once you have this list, you can occasionally glance at it, think about how wonderfully fascinating each and every one of those books sounds, do the mental math on what small percentage of them you'll actually be able to finish reading before you die if you start reading right now, and... well, i find that grimly motivating :D;;;

* i actually go back-and-forth between preferring to read on kindle vs dead-tree book every few months or so, and i just try to roll with whatever's more comfortable for me at the time. i've got a shelf of unread books and a pile of unread ebooks at any given time to choose from when the mood strikes

* i always carry whatever book i'm reading with me everywhere—a huge chunk of my reading gets done on the bus, on business trips, at the airport, waiting for a friend to pick me up, etc, and it all adds up

* even if you are a slow reader like me, you can usually finish a novel every other week by just reading an hour a day. i find this encouraging! (and if you pick the right novels, you won't be able to put the thing down, which is bad for sleep but great for getting through that list, lmao)

[airlock384]

that was such a prompt and thorough response! I have a feeling I activated your trap card there- (in any case, though, I greatly appreciate it!)

I suppose that first one there, vis-a-vis dropping a book immediately if it's boring me, would be where I'm committing a cardinal book sin. to an extent, it can't helped; at first there's all the assigned reading in school and sometimes you just get assigned the lousiest shit ever (I am eternally plagued by vague memories of a Cool Male Lead who Has A Very Philosophical Reason For Never Cleaning Up His Place), and then there's uni and well, I am now in my third course in which the reading is bad in some unique way. (at least this time around, it's bad because it's absolutely interminable, even if it's usually interesting and reads well until you start getting exhausted-). and then there's the ADHD -- and I was about to say that I always have to push myself at least a little bit in order to get any reading done, but now that I think about it, huh, no I don't. some things I just find myself swept along by so spontaneously, I will murder my sleep without a second thought in order to keep going (like a certain friend's very good fanfic, for example-). I suppose I've got to normalize it for myself that reading for leisure should be something I do leisurely, even if I'm trying to read about more interesting topics!

I do also have an hour-long daily commute that I could stand to use for reading more often, but then again, 7 AM is probably the exact kind of time when most kinds of reading would require an amount of pushing through-

anyway! I'll make a note of all these recs and hopefully one of these days I might draw out a plan of engagement from them -- again, thank you very much! in exchange, one of these days I could happily bolster that existentially long rec list of yours by pointing to a few particularly interesting classics of Brazilian literature