Well, I thought that I’d briefly talk about how it is perfectly ok – normal even – to take your time with a novel.
This was something I ended up thinking about in mid-late April after noticing that I was still less than halfway through the lengthy sci-fi novel (“House Atreides” by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson) that I’m re-reading at the moment. Since I want to avoid another four or five years of “novel burn-out”, I’ve been avoiding regimented binge-reading and just reading 1-50 pages of it on days when I feel like it. On some days, due to various stresses at the time, I haven’t gotten round to reading any of it. It’s a really good book, but I’m not rushing it.
The thing is, even as recently as the 2000s, this sort of thing was literally the norm with novels. Like single-player videogames, they were just something you picked up and enjoyed for as long as you wanted to. If it’s really good, you might end up spending an hour or two with it, or it might just be something you enjoy in a spare five minutes or so.
During the 20th century/early 21st century pre-smartphone heyday of the novel, when novels were a popular and affordable entertainment medium, this was how most people read novels. They just read them whenever they had time or whenever they felt like it, or to pass the time on long journeys or whatever. People didn’t set themselves “reading goals” or push themselves to read as many novels as possible within a given time. It certainly wasn’t seen as a “productivity” thing, but as a fun thing to relax with. Emphasis on relax.
Literally the only reason, aside from required reading in schools/colleges, why you might feel pressured to “read more quickly” is because of modern social media. A relatively recent invention which, yes, has helped keep the medium of novels popular and relevant… but often via things like “book haul” videos, regular reviews, videos by people who see reading as their primary hobby (rather than a fun side-thing like most people historically have) etc…
Add to this the fact that, these days, reading is often seen as “productivity” thing. Even with novels. And, if you’re making stuff for the internet, then book reviews can be seen as a way to “justify” spending time reading. And, yes, reviewing novels is fun and it feels rewarding when you do it but, and this happened to me in 2018-20, you can end up falling into a mindset of reading novels just for the sake of having something to review. And reading goes from being something fun to being a “productivity” chore.
The point of all of this is that the internet can give you a false impression of how much you “should” be reading or how quickly you should be finishing novels. Back in the pre-smartphone and pre-social media days, the only times when people really “read to a deadline” was if they were in school/college or were professional literary critics for newspapers. For the overwhelming majority of readers, you just read as much as you felt like as quickly as you felt like. The point of reading was to have fun. Yes, you might blaze through a particularly gripping novel in a day or three, but you might also spend a couple of weeks or more on a single novel.
No-one was watching, no-one was judging and no-one expected you to “show off” about it. In other words, even these days, it’s ok to read novels slowly because they are meant to be fun and because this is how decades, or even centuries, of readers have enjoyed novels – back in the days when they were a lot more popular than they are today.
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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂
