Sometimes it takes me a while to figure myself out. I’ve been doing a lot of reading this summer and for the past week or so I’ve been stuck on a book. It’s translated and it is dense. It uses big words and, while I’m no stranger to big words, this slows down my reading and comprehension… especially when the sentence length approaches the length of a page. So many ideas that it hurts to try to sit and read thirty pages. It is even kind of painful to try and read ten pages. The book is long though and I’ve got a certain number of pages I’m supposed to read every day in order to finish by the beginning of the upcoming school year. So I’ve been falling behind. Since I’m keeping track of how far I’m falling behind (with big, bold and red lettering) I reached my wits end. It was in this rock bottom place that I changed my reading habit slightly and saw a vast improvement.
I picked up another book. Yeah, I know, not exactly brilliant. However, this tiny switch made all the difference. I had some plays that I needed to re-read and I knew that I could read them in one sitting. So I picked one up, checked another book off of my “to read” list, and then happily read another pages of the dense and difficult material that had been clouding my generally positive demeanor. Somehow I accomplished two tasks at once. I made forward progress on my overall reading goal for the summer while improving my mood by avoiding long chunks of difficult reading. The rest of the summer will be spent using this system. If the book is difficult I will pick up the less difficult books to read between chapters or sections or any logical stopping point. That and I’ll wear my shotgun earmuffs.