Oh look! It's a post! About reading!
I love reading! I read every day, usually fanfiction. I take my Kindle Paperwhite everywhere I go. My old Kindle is in the bathroom loaded with books so that I can read while I'm in the bathroom... doing bathroom stuff. Um.
But while I love to read, reading also sometimes makes me feel anxious, self-conscious, not doing it right. You see, I'm a slow reader. I don't know if my reading speed (as in actually words read per minute) is on the slow end of things. It's probably average, but it does feel slow to me.
I mean, whenever I read something about improving your reading speed it usually says that you shouldn't "speak" the words in your head, but whenever I try that I don't really retain much of the information that is on the page. I do skip over boring parts, but when I like something I want to read the words, I want to savour the words, I guess.
But it's not just that! I don't seem to be able to read more than an hour, maybe two (and that's stretching it), at a time. Even when I'm totally into it, I can't get past that point. I need to take a break from reading for a while. It's even worse when I'm in bed reading, my attention span goes down even more. I'm lucky if I manage to read half an hour, when I'm in bed.
Because of that it takes so much time until I get through a book or fanfiction. Sometimes I avoid reading long stories for that reason, because a 50K story might take me a week to read! I'm on my second book this year and I'm only a third into the book.
On a side note: I do read more books when I'm not reading a lot (a lot by my standards anyway) of fanfiction, but even then I've never managed to read more than like 20-25 books a year.
And then I see people, who read like 50 books or more a year! People who read a 100k story in one evening and I wonder how the hell they are doing it? What's their secret? Am I being defective in some way that I can't do it?
I put pressure on myself, downloading all the fanfiction I want to read, buying all the books so that my unread books pile (at least nowadays it's a virtual pile of eBooks on my Kindle) grows and grows. And I'm doing that even though I know I won't be able to get through all of that in the next year, hell even in the next five years. :/
So, basically, I suck at reading! A lot. :/
Crossposts: http://bettina.dreamwidth.org/760787.html