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[bafooz]

Miyazaki Tōten, My Thirty-Three Years' Dream: The Autobiography of Miyazaki Tōten, trans. Etō Shinkichi and Marius B. Jansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

A fascinating autobiography and historical record; Tōten (born Miyazaki Torazō) felt with a burning passion that China was to play an imperative in East Asian & world affairs,

Comments

[averagesmartguy]

Good lord, how quickly do you go through academic books?

[bafooz]

One a day, will be ramping it up to two shortly. :)

(I have to pass my Japanese minor field exam in a few weeks, so)

[averagesmartguy]

Wow. So is that pretty much what you do in a day then? You must read insanely quickly. I remember back senior year of college when I was taking a coupla 3- or 400 level history classes I was able to get up to two pages a minute, but I really disliked doing it. You're probably reading even faster though eh?

[bafooz]

Well, no, I do lots of stuff in a day. ;) It takes me between 4 and 6 hours to get through a book if I'm just galloping through (sometimes a bit less if it 'reads' fast, like that ed. volume by Vlastos I did a few days ago). ETA: that includes breaks and stuff, I'm not good at sitting down and just reading for 4 hours straight.

I guess one of the important skills in grad school is learning how to 'get through' the reading in a timely manner, which frequently includes NOT reading every word and skimming whole pages (or chapters). I can get through 'normal' sized books in less than 4 hours, it just really depends on what the content is. I'm not skimming the 'textbook' of Tokugawa-present Japanese history, for example - I need to pay close attention to that.

I generally think the 'feeling' I get from a book is more important than remembering tiny details, so as long as I get the major argument/points, I'm fine. For books I own, I do star/bracket/dogear stuff I find of interest, so I can usually flip back through at my leisure.

[averagesmartguy]

Yeah, I getcha. I am grateful in that I learned how to do that myself thanks to senior year having an insane reading load. And for certain things it's definitely really useful, but yeah, I just didn't enjoy the rushed feel I got from it. Though it was nice being able to whenever I hit something incredibly dry, such as Foucault's The History of Sexuality. I'll probably end up having to re-employ that skill again once I go back to school. *grumbles*