Just realized I was speed-reading book club picks for 2 years and missing everything

It hit me last Tuesday when someone asked what I thought about the symbolism of the river in that McCarthy novel and I drew a total blank because I'd been skimming for plot points instead of actually reading.

2 comments

2 Comments

jamie_white13d ago

Oh man, this is exactly what happened to me with our mystery book club. I flew through like 6 Agatha Christie novels last year, skipping all the descriptive stuff about the English countryside and just reading dialogue to find out whodunit. Then someone asked me about the atmosphere in "And Then There Were None" and I was like, "uh, it was on an island I guess?" Felt like such a fake fan. The river thing you mentioned is brutal though, I've definitely done the same with literary fiction where the setting is basically a character. Now I make myself read out loud sometimes or at least stop after each chapter to think about what actually happened besides the plot points.

christopher_wells413d ago

Never felt more called out in my life lol. The "fake fan" thing hits hard because I've lied my way through so many book conversations by just nodding along. Agreed that stopping after each chapter is a solid move, it forces you to actually process what you just read instead of treating the book like a movie script. Reading out loud is a good trick too, slows you down enough to catch the small details you'd normally power through. For me it's the character descriptions that I skip, I'll miss a whole paragraph about someone's face and then later they're described with totally different features and I'm lost. Sometimes I wonder if I'm even reading for the right reasons or if I'm just on autopilot lol.