I'm like this with video games and shows tbh
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I had a book not too long ago that I was really looking forward to reading. It was written by a guy I didn't know very well at the time, but it's a sci-fi novel using the park all us freak kids hung out in back in the 90s as the setting and featuring one of the very odd mentally ill people that came to the park who used to be sort of a mascot.
This is a professionally published book, not something from a vanity press.
After the fifth punctuation error, the second of two on that page, I put down the book without getting past chapter four.
It made me twitch too much.
AUDIOBOOKS BABY
Part of it is forcing yourself to read the books you haven't finished instead of browsing the internet during downtime. Doesn't always work, but it works sometimes.
Having a book club where you can talk about what you've read with your friends (and wine, a lot of wine) also helps.
I've been reading House of Leaves and I'm struggling to get through it because the characters are just abrasive fuckheads tbh. Only halfway through after like two months.
Are you able to give a short summary what it's about? I've had a few people saying it's fantastic and very special to them but I didn't really get much of an answer why. And trying to find anything on the internet hasn't been successful to the point where I get what's so appealing about it.
I could of course just try reading it for myself but it's currently in a backlog along with quite a few other books :P
People like to gatekeep it because it's unique in its formatting and style.
Basically it's a story with a ton of nested framing devices. You have:
- A guy named Navidson whose house keeps changing its geometry, until one day an infinite, sprawling series of corridors opens up, which he then explores with a team of professionals. Navidson is a jealous asshole who constantly gets into ego battles with every man around him.
- A guy named Zampano, who is writing a pseudo-academic analysis of Navidson's journey, stating that it all happened in a movie. Zampano is a paper-thin character who is only really incidentally connected to the story and doesn't get a ton of development until you're far into the novel.
- A guy named Johnny, who finds Zampano's writings after he dies and reads them/adds footnotes. Johnny is our main perspective character and is, imo, an irredeemable womanizer who probably has schizophrenia. I swear half his scenes are him boning some random woman he just met, and the other half are word salad or incoherent stories that draw vague parallels to Zampano's writings.
- "The editors", who are compiling all of these notes and footnotes into a book with appendices, which is canonically what you're reading as the end user.
The story unfolds in a way that invites you to read through footnotes, appendices, and sprawling side-narratives to a point where you can just get lost in random threads. Some people really like that, I find it annoying. It would be more involving if the characters were better. Even the side characters are mostly just assholes or set dressing, and every woman in the story is a loose slut to a point where it's weird.
Thanks for the explanation :D I remember some of the things I found out before and now it finally makes more sense. I saw some of the names you mentioned but it never clicked for me that it's (in-universe) multiple people's writings that make up the book. It definitely sounds interesting, and I'm fearing and looking forward to how cringe-worthy the characters can get.
I read so much in my youth, I could read cover to cover in one go thanks to the power of hyperfocus. Reading was fun and synergised greatly with my ADD-fueled daydreaming.
Unfortunately though high school came along and had to fuck up my intrinsic motivation by force feeding the boomer drivel that 'everybody should have read in their lives', and having to write book reports where you'd have to analyse those books to death. Assignments could vary from analysing all the different narrative arcs in the story to the relationship between each main character in the story and even more obscure stuff that I don't even (want to) remember.
Anyway, this meant reading the 'classic' Dutch writers like Reve, Mullisch, Wolkers etc and then analysing a story you didn't even care about. Fun fact: those writers seem to have an extremely limited repertoire: do you want to read about addiction, WWII, or sex? Ok ok, you had 'het Gouden Ei' by Krabbé, on which the movie 'the Vanishing' was based. Guess that was a breath of less stale air.
But in the end it sucked the enjoyment I felt when reading from my very soul and replaced it with the feeling that reading books is a chore. At times a slight shimmer of that old spark returns, but never for long. Depending on how often I feel like reading, getting through a book usually takes me months to years these days and rarely captures me like in the past. I'll never forgive the sadistic bastards who came up with this part of our educational system.
Anyway, sorry for dumping this on you, turned out to be more of a rant than I initially intended. If anybody knows how to convince my brain to consider reading to be fun again, I welcome any insights.
My mom would have to make me put books down to eat dinner. Then came along 5th grade. We had to read 50 books, each one representing a US state and the states were grouped up in different categories. The books had to be chosen from a pre approved list and the books were anywhere from 6th grade to 8th grade reading difficulty. Then we had to write a full page summary on the book. Which meant on average we were reading more than a book a week. That piled on top of all the other homework the other teachers piled on and it was fucking miserable. I spent almost every school night from the moment I got home to the moment I had to go to bed doing homework, also I had to get up early because I was the first bus stop so yay getting up at 5:30 AM to make the bus. Bonus was I was also the last stop so I got to spend over 2 hours a day on the bus. I usually had so much homework that I'd start doing it on the bus home. Oh and if you fell behind in reading you got punished by staying inside for 2nd recess to read more. By the time I left 5th grade I hated school, I hated reading, I hated teachers, and I hated learning. And I still do to this day. I feel like the education system failed me and I'm suffering for it now.
Well, that takes 'required reading' to a whole new dystopian level. I'm sorry you had to go through that, that's terrible and I just cannot see any other outcome than forging a severe resentment against reading. Hopefully you'll one day find the motivation again, but I certainly wouldn't blame you if you never want to read anything again after going through that.
You're describing exactly what happened to me. In elementary school, I read so many books that I would win free books each semester. We had mandatory reading quizzes each month for books of our choice, and high scorers would select a few books to keep from a big spread. I would read larger, more complex books from the 3rd to 6th grades, as they would net me more reading points than simple books. Thus, my (competitive) book reading habit would feed into reading books I received for free, which in turn could be used to take extra quizzes to win more books.
Then, middle school happened. I was stuck reading books I didn't care for, covering topics I was already familiar with, and writing analyses that I was already capable of forming within my head. This continued through high school, where I found that I was so disillusioned with narrative literature that I much preferred non-fiction and educational content. I fell out of love with reading, and I don't think I've finished reading a book on my own time, out of enjoyment, in almost a decade (excluding textbooks and non-fiction).
I just can't find the strength to read through any narratives, as all the busy work ruined reading for me. My least favorite portion of reading for school was being made to fill out entire tables of characters, with details on the mannerisms, presentations, quotes, etc. of each. It was all bullshit.
I enjoyed reading this rant, I found it very relatable, even though it sounds like we have quite different academic backgrounds. Nowadays, I read a decent amount of non fiction for fun, but I still struggle with reader's block if I don't feel like I have a reason to read, like a sort of self-given assignment to be studying for. That's probably school's fault too
Because of the hyper focus thing, I had already read all the required reading books. The teachers believed me too, because they saw how many books I was tearing through every year. I would turn in a summary of the book, and then go read something that was "at my level," such as The Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, War and Peace, or Dr. Zhivago. When I gave my analysis of those books, I at least tried to make them sound interesting, rather than ponderous.
The upshot was that when I got to University, I didn't tell them I already read the books, I just breezed through the work.
I resonate with this. To get back into the habit I had to find ways to engage multiple senses: https://smoores.gitlab.io/storyteller/
In 2020 I bought a new tablet just so I could get back to reading books.
99% of time I've used it for YouTube.
I'm getting back to reading more ebooks just now, OK?
(A local ebook store said it's quitting this month. As I was transferring my EPUB purchases to Google Play Books, I realised I hadn't actually used this app for ages. Despite, you know, it being one of the few ebook readers I like.)
Got the A-1 iPad mini for reading and never installed Youtube on it. It is my dedicated reading tablet and I love it. Usually I wouldn't buy Apple products, but the new processor had me feeling a bit excited. The Kindle Paperwhite and Kindle Fire 13" both had glaring issues and reading the internet's negative views on android tablets left me feeling meh. The better kindle e-readers are really expensive too so I thought to just buy a fully functional high quality tablet instead.
You might try out FBReader. It has lots of options to customize it, and you can store your books in Calibre where it can access them via OPDS instead of getting locked into some online BS like Google.
Oh wow, FBReader was literally the first Android EPUB reader I used... In 2013 or so. I guess I need to see how it has improved since then.
Also, Calibre and I have a strong frenemies relationship. Once upon a time I wanted to meticulously download, de-DRM, catalog and locally archive all of my ebooks. But while Calibre has the technological chops to do it, usability is a bit quirky. I actually just installed Calibre at my current system and will bring over my old ebook library as soon as I dig up my old laptop. And also bring over about a decade of Kindle purchases (most unread, yeah).
Edit: Wikipedia on FBReader:
In 2015 the software for all platforms became closed-source: the old open-source code hasn't been updated since. The Android app was split into Free and Premium versions,
Awwwww crap. Hope there's an actually maintained open source fork.
I use Book Reader (it's on F-Droid) for my phone, which works well enough... don't know how it performs on a tablet or if it has the features you're looking for.
I would wholeheartedly recommend a dedicated e-reader with E-Ink display for more 'serious' reading (I have a Tolino for the evenings/bed. Depending on where you are located you could also look into PocketBooks or Kobos... just make sure they're not chaining you to a closed ecosystem like Kindles).
Yah, FBreader is all closed source now AFAIK. But it's still free, though you can get premium, I've never bothered.
As for Calibre, I've used the DRM once upon a time and I think it's still there. I find it easier to use Openbooks to get the DRM free versions from Usenet of anything I've bought rather than dink around in Calibre.
I have a docker-compose.yml that stands up a Guacamole-enabled Calibre server, CalibreWeb and Openbooks if you're interested. IDK how it would work on Windows docker if that's your thing, but I run it on a rPi with docker and it's fine.
I really love calibre, but agree it can be a bit quirky. Like many ADHD people, I'm my own worst enemy sometimes, when I attempt to do a big import of books and then it's too much work and my library gets messy. Something I did that helped was I had different tags for different levels of processed. Newly imported books would be auto-tagged "new". Then I'd batch process them and remove the tag if I fully completed it. Often I'd burn out when I'd discover a book that still had DRM, or was missing OCR (ability to select text within pdf), so I'd add "DRM" or "NoOCR" tags. My workflow works pretty well for me now, because I've made it easier to do half a job
True! One of the big things that really put me off from reading ebooks was that I used to buy book bundles (e.g. from HumbleBundle) and then just dumped them in my library. I really should have been cataloging each new book bundle, but I didn't, somehow. I just saw a giant big mess of my own doing in the ebook library and went "nope" and that just became another Big Pile of Stuff I Need To Deal With Later.
Book bundles make things messy, yeah.
Something that I've really struggled with is that I wish it were easier to make notes of where you've gotten a recommendation from. Like let's say I'm learning Python and there's a dizzying amount of books available for that. Someone I personally know and respect gives a glowing recommendation of a book, so I download it and process it's metadata in calibre or similar. Then a Reddit thread has a dump of free books. I download and import those. Then a blogger I really like recommends a few books, so I retrieve any of those I haven't got yet and import them. Time passes, and I go looking in my library for a book to learn Python with, and I get overwhelmed by choices and I can't remember which of them were good and for what reasons.
I have a similar problem with bookmarks, because sure you can add tags, but tags are best when you've got a limited vocabulary, to maximise reusability. What if I just want to write a brief note about why I deem this worthy of saving, so that I'm not confused when I'm skimming over bookmarks months or years later.