Why people who read a lot are not as smart as you think they are
-on escapism, love of reading and lack of original thoughts and ideas
"I finished my goodreads goal 4 months early this year, I read 300 books in total and these are the 14 I read this month..."
... or something like that, is what we encounter every few scrolls when exploring Booktok. People seem to read more than they work or study or sleep and things have in some spaces become competitive. Every few weeks I see someone with an even higher amount of finished books per week, month or year. There's families documenting how many books each member brings with them on vacation, 7 books for 7 days someone says, there are roommates comparing the amount of books in their rooms, one has 80 more than the other and bestfriends vlogging their "readathons", where they try to read as much as they can for a specific amount of time. For a while I was consuming this content and kept wondering
It's really an age-old discussion.What is worth more? The amount of books you read or how intensively you read them. I can't say that i'm on either side (afterall, books can be very different and I believe it's in their nature to either stay with us for a long or a short amount of time depending on the genre, so let me preface by making clear that we are mainly talking about fiction here) however, I do have a tendency...
In good times I finish maybe four books a month, my goal for every year has been 12 finished books, 1 per month. But, I have the tendency to start books, read them halfway through and discard them, a bad habit. I leave them before they can leave me. I do the same with movies and shows actually, I think that maybe I can't let things come to an end, let them go... I want the story to go on forever and I'm scared of it leaving me, what will I do when I know all there is to know about this character, about their story. There have been times where I grieved characters at the end of a book as if they had died, as If I couldn't open the book back up and find them waiting right there again, unaltered, waiting to recall their story for me as many times as I like, never leaving out a single detail. For this reason, or maybe just because I'm that type of person, there have been very few books I have reread entirely, but that's a subject for another time.
Let me give some examples, I finished "Jane Eyre" in 2 months, I started "Wuthering heights" 3 years ago on a plane, didn't touch it for years and then finished it last month within a week. It took me about one and a half years to finish Donna Tartt's fantastic novel "The Secret History" it really took me that long to get through eventhough I loved it and that's why it's a very good example of my point.
I was savoring that book, I enjoyed every second in it and I allowed it to alter me over the span of months, I felt as if I was growing with the characters. At times I almost felt as if the events of the book were happening in real time, sometimes even a little slower. I reread passages all the time, instead of progressing in the story, I take breaks to go back, look for connections, remind myself how things were described in detail, I take notes and even go on my phone to make little moodboards and collages. I try to catch the essence of that exact moment by doing so. I'm grateful for it. Maybe this habit will cause me to miss out on things because I can't read as much as others and there might be some books on my shelves that I'll never get to know. But the ones I did read, I cherished, I know them and they met me and walked with me for a while, side by side, I got to know the book and it's almost like the book got to know a little bit of me, of all the versions of myself, all those times I opened and closed the book in different places, in different moods, at different times.
By reading a book for such a long time, it actually becomes a part of your life. I heard somewhere that the brain struggles to differentiate between real and fantasy. I don't know if it's true but it certainly feels like it sometimes. You remember reading scenes like you remember that event a couple days ago and you find yourself wanting to say things like "yes I remember the sword fight, that was 2 weeks ago when I was reading at the dinnertable while cooking", "this moment reminds me of what that character just said yesterday". Instead of consuming a story all at once and seeing it as a whole, you slowly experience it alongside the protagonists, because they move with you in time. Whatever was read this way will give you a feeling more similar to a real-life memorie, like a situation that just happend.
You think to yourself, I was a different person the last time this character showed up, I remember I had no understanding for their actions, I had a lot of time to reflect in the meantime, I get them now, I wouldn't have a couple weeks ago when I last dove into this story.
Slight spoiler warning ahead, but when I was reading the summer house scenes of "The Secret History", I had to take several breaks to let the descriptions settle in and visualize the house and the backyard and the lake. I went as far as creating a pinterest board of that special place and thereby allowing it to come alive in my mind. Now that I finished the book, the house looks totally different to me and I believe I otherwise could've forgotten those initial images in my mind. But I didn't forget, I can still see the building jealousy inducing as it was when I didn't know about the true characters of it's residents and the fateful events that would take place in and around it. (I wonder if Richard Papen ever felt similarly...) I can go back and remember exactly what it felt and looked like while reading the scenes and not knowing what is to come, because I documented it. The scene, this house is still alive in my mind because I allowed myself the time to let it come to life. In a way I let my fantasy expand the book and the story.
This is a quality I believe is worth a lot. Savouring books. I didn't just read the story of a couple of college students committing murder, I let it consume me, alter me and half of the time spent with the book, I wasn't reading it, I was contemplating it. I was In my own mind considering the different characters opinions and actions and comparing them to mine, my life, real life situations. What would I have done in their situation? And what would they do in mine?
I believe it is much simpler to just consume one book after the other and not allow yourself to have a single thought, instead of having the bravery to spent more time in your head, in your actual real life than in these books. We all enjoy, need some escapism here and there but when it becomes all we take from them, I fear a lot is lost, and we are missing out on a large portion of their worth as if we had never read them at all. I love them and I value them but I believe their strength lies not in just entertaining and distracting us but in teaching and encouraging us to live and experience our own lives.
Did I clickbait you a little bit with that title? Maybe.
But maybe you were one of those people who had to hear that it's okay to be a slow reader, an occasional reader, only being able to read a couple books a year because of your busy lifestyle and other interests, there are advantages. So if you take anything from me, may it be this, consider allowing your books, even if they are "just romance or fantasy..." to inspire you, allow them to love you back.
But what do I know, maybe I just have an unhealthily large fantasy...
