Reading Voraciously With Care
Summer is definitely here. Which means you better have your beach body ready and your pile of beach books to read through while you take in as much summer sun as possible. Our click-bate culture has yet to squelch people’s love of sitting on the beach, or by the pool, with a good book in hand.
Summer seems to be the season in which people voraciously consume books. They read all day and complete half their yearly GoodReads Goal in a mere three months.
This hunger to read is a wonderful thing, but by consuming so much so fast we often forget to relish in the book itself. We take in the plot, but we don’t really sit with the characters and appreciate the world the author has painstakingly created. We don’t allow ourselves to sit with the emotions the author has forced upon us and appreciate how they crafted this story that sucked us in or challenged us.
It’s like going to an all you can eat buffet and refilling plate after plate of your favorite food, it gets old and you leave the restaurant bloated. Reading with such voracity is a lot like that. You end up lacking a certain appreciation for a book you once loved and you end up bloated with characters and emotions you haven’t fully digested.
I completely understand this desire to read as fast as you can whenever you have the down time. That desire to just read one more chapter, one more page before hunger or sleep force you back into reality. I’ve read series in a day before because I just could not stop.
We are an impatient culture. We want the next thing, the next page right now, but if we just slow down we can have a whole new appreciation for the books we read.
I’m not saying that you need to slow down to a snail’s pace of reading, we all have different natural tendencies when it comes to how quickly we read, but when you come across a particularly moving passage or scene, take a minute. Sit with that passage and really understand and appreciate why and how it moved you. And when you finally finish the book take a moment to really reflect on what you have read.
Read this summer. Sit on the beach and read through as many books as you can. Read voraciously. But, whether you are reading a fun romance, a mystery thriller, a dense classic or anything in-between, every book has something to say, some nugget of truth about life. We just have to slow down, take a minute and find it.
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