At 9:20 PM -0400 13/12/2000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>In a message dated 12/13/00 9:44:21 AM Mountain Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>writes:
>
>I haven't skipped to the middle of a book since I was about 9 or 10.
How weird. I've never considered doing such a thing. I was drunkenly
reading a children's picture book to a friend last week (in a wacko accent,
don't ask) and when she told me to skip to the good part, I had this weird
reaction to the idea at all. Hrmph. I think it was the first time I did it.
For fiction, that is. In University, though, when I started taking lit
classes, I learned that theory texts don't need to be read linearly. I
remember in one class having a short dicussion about reformulation of
tables of contents to suit the reader . . . ie., ways you can take a book
and make it your own by using effective reading techniques. If you're only
looking for material dealing with topics A, B, and C, you can use things
like the table of contents, the index, and the footnotes to help you find
what you want. You can also assemble "samples" of a text that are pretty
much set up to give yourself a sample of the kind of approaches being used
in a text without reading the whole thing. This is useful for when you are
confronted with 60 possibly-useful texts on the author you are researching
for a major term paper.
Even so, I have trouble skipping even small blocks of text sometimes in
unfamiliar fields. Even if I have read the explanation of Schroedinger's
cat I don't know how many times, I'm always paranoid that the author will
explain it in some way that is specially tuned to the bigger topic at hand,
so I always read it.
(I consider myself a slow reader: I can do about 30 pages an hour,
sometimes 40, for fiction, though I can be a fair bit quicker for theory
and nonfiction... (like, 50-60 pages an hour . . . with so-so retention))
> (I
>also don't give up on books in the middle, even if one seems to be a waste
>of my time -- if I do that, I've admitted that the time I've put into it
>already was a waste, and I hate doing that.)
Owch. I don't do that at the increasingly-common "crap ending" that comes
after 300 or 400 pages of pretty good storytelling, but if at midpoint (or
even before) I think a book is crap, I throw it aside and don't turn back
(semi-recent recipients of this honor include Clive Barker's _The Great and
Secret Show_, which I thought was brilliant in high school, and a vamp
novel called _Afterage_ by Yvonne Navarro). Probably this is a function of
being a slow reader, and also of having had so much to read in school,
including stuff I that was convinced WAS crap. (Try reading Dorothy
Wordsworth's Grasmere Journals sometime: "hd. the tooth-ach again today..."
ARGH! *Nobody* should have to read those damn journals.)
Gord
