Comment by chicken-stew
7 days ago
I love the result of reading, and the occasional jolt I get when reading, but not the activity of reading. I need to consume the text word for word, scanning with my eyes. The thing that gets me most happened after I got into Hemmingway: everything in a book happens in the forefront. In a movie you can have things happening outside your span od attention. Not in a book. You can’t have a doorbell happening in the background - it’s explicit and relevant to the story (which has spawned a counter-culture of writers).
My apologies for over-commenting in this page but, uh, is there a way to read without reading the words? WTF does "I need to consume the text word for word, scanning with my eyes." mean? Are people reading with their eyes closed or using braille or listening to the paper or something?
I’m an outlier due to medical issues following a burnout to the crisp. I occasionally zone out, most often when I’m reading. So reading has become a chore - I can’t switch on an auto-pilot like I used to. This has made the activity literally “scanning with my eyes” and doing so with attention. On bad days I re-parse the same sentence several times and it just won’t get interpreted. I used to consume a lot of text and it got me two master degrees. Now I barely read and don’t remember what I read. Reading something online is by scrolling the text to the top bar, like pointing a finger to the line you’re reading.
Hope this answers your wtf
I read a lot. My subjective experience of reading fiction is that I daydream it. After I build up speed over a couple pages I'm not really aware my eyeballs are sliding over markings or that my fingers are turning pages.
Some people can't do that, but who knows what their brains are doing that mine can't.