It would rather negate the entertainment value, and would feel more like work, if I had to take notes for a book club style experience, though as evidenced by the popularity of book clubs, there's plenty of people who feel different.
Agree. Would love to see examples from people of books that fall in this category. I assume it is a short list for most people.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972 triggered in me an abiding fascination with the operation of the political process.
There's some obvious stuff:
- Proust
- Tolstoy, Dostoevsky
- Joyce (although to be fair, how can you tell?)
- Probably David Foster Wallace
- Knuth :)But it's not uncommon for people to do this with religious texts, too. Reading for devotion, for understanding, out of a since of obligation, whatever. Doesn't matter: it's a distinct way of interacting with books, different from reading a potboiler mystery novel.
I got pulled into Dostoyevsky through Brothers K, which led me to Notes eventually.
Do you know what translation of Notes you read? I think I read P&V, and if I read it again I'd want to try something else
A nice comparison: https://web.archive.org/web/20131109182920/http://comparetra...
1984
Stranger In A Strange Land
The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress
Time Enough For Love
Friday
The Crying Of Lot 49
Seveneves
Neuromancer
I’ve read all of these at least 4 times, with reading-about-them in between.
I usually pick one up to re-read just a part of it, then I get sucked in and before I know it I’ve re-read the whole thing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y83UkvHpYk
Why would you pretend to have read a ~300 page book, just read the bloody thing.
I read Seveneves once from the library and wouldn't mind reading it again though.
I've read The Sprawl books (trilogy?), but accidentally did it out of order and separated by years, so it took me an embarrassingly long time to make some connections. I should read them again in order this time!
So far I have only re-read Inversions and Excession, the two that were the most fun the first time through.
I disagree that it's not better...
The "march through a book, page-by-page, as quickly as possible" method is wasteful of your time. That just seems like a task for the sake of being able to say "i've read it", and even if someone is that pretentious, it's a pretty low return on investment - I say screw that, you can only read so many books in your life, read the ones that genuinely interest you at that moment in time. Even if you don't finish or read it front to back contiguously without large breaks, at least the content is meaningful to you while you read it, so you get the most from your time spent reading.
Anyway, I think there are at least three kinds of reading.
The one where you skim some reviews and read twenty pages is one of them. You can do this in order to just be able to say you've read something without putting in the "work", but you can also do this as part of a serious study of some subject: For example, maybe I only need to read a specific chapter in a book to answer a question I have, or I only need to check every page that mentions a specific keyword related to what I'm studying.
Another way of reading is when you march through a book, page-by-page, as quickly as possible. When you get to the last page you say "done" and then you move on. A few months later, all you mat remember about the book is a outline of the plot, in a novel, or maybe one or two important points, in a non-fiction book.
(I think listening to books in audiobook format is another way of reading, but in practice it's often very close to this second form)
The last one is when you read the book, then think about it, then read it again, then read about it, then keep reading it over and over for the rest of your life.
The latter is much more rewarding, but my point is not that one is better than the other, but that all of these are separate activities that can legitimately be called reading. Maybe we need more words for reading.