Damn. A few of the book instagrams I follow are posting their 6-month recaps. I thought I was doing a really fucking exceptional job with my 12 books read so far this year.
Fifty-five. One of them has read 55. How is that even possible? They can’t possibly be earning enough from social media for that to be their full time job. And when do they shower? And clean their house?
Anyway, what are you guys reading at the moment? I’ve got Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone going at the moment. It’s so good so far.
And I’m trying to make my way through Junji Ito’s works and Ring and other Japanese horror for a class I’m teaching next semester. Can’t say I’m loving Ito’s stuff.
They can’t. Like, my dyslexia makes me a very slow reader in general, but I’m not that slow. 55 books in 6 months is like 7 books a fortnight or something. That’s insane.
I’ve never understood why some people treat reading like it’s a hot dog eating competition. For me reading is about enjoying and absorbing a book, thinking it over, appreciating it. I doubt the speed readers are doing that. Also, some people count audio books as reading, and listen to them sped up. If all year you only read one book and it’s memorable and impactful to you, you’ve gained more than someone who hotdog ate 100 of them.
That’s what I’m trying to do. A long time ago an ex made fun of my for the kinda of books I read, so I started reading the kinds he would or the kinds that would make me seem smart, which sucked the fun from it. I’m just learning to love it again.
I finally finished The Mirror and the Light (Book 3 of the Wolf Hall trilogy) last week. Been reading it on and off for 18 months now and finally put in the effort to finish it. A great book, but...dense. Currently halfway through Station Eleven for something a bit easier to read.
12 is a great number, I think that's the sum total of the number of books I've read in the past two years 😅
I have had both the Wolf Hall series and Station Eleven on my to-read list for a long time. But the Wolf Hall ones are so big that I haven’t been able to bring myself to. And Station Eleven got pushed riiiiiight down to the bottom of the list when the pandemic hit and I couldn’t bring myself to read anything about devastating flus and stuff. In march 2020 I was half way through World War Z. I’ve still not been able to go back to it.
12 is a massive number for me too. I’ve made a really conscious effort to replace screen time with book time this year and a friend and I decided to do a book club this year, so it’s been keeping me accountable
...I have read 52 books. Technically a majority of them are comics, graphic novels and manga, but it's still reading imho.
I'm still trying to make it through What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo. It's a book about C-PTSD so it's very triggering. And why it's taken me over a month to read it.
Hell yeah, I listened to the Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone audiobook last year, I thoroughly enjoyed it!
At the moment I'm reading American Elsewhere by Robert Jackson Bennett and I'm listening to Wool by Hugh Howey. I've read Wool a few times before but now the audiobook is finally available through Libby so I've been listening to that at work. The rest of the series is booked out for ages though, I suspect due to the new TV series based on it, so I think I'm gonna end up just rereading the rest in physical form because they're so addicting and I haven't got patience when it comes to good stories.