If you
were ‘round these parts last week, you’ll remember that I set a half-hearted
BookTube-A-Thon TBR. In my TBR post, I hedged
my bets and made it clear that I knew I probably wouldn’t make much headway on
my TBR; naturally, I lived up (or down, actually) to my expectations. The only book I managed to complete was The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie,
which I was two-thirds of the way through by the time the reading challenge
began. I did, however, begin reading Siri
Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, which
is an engrossing but not rollicking read.
As of today I am forty-two pages into the novel.
My
latest TBR failure hasn’t put me off reading lists or reading challenges,
though. I’m a competitive, goal-oriented
person by nature and these kinds of personal benchmarks as a strong motivator
for me . . . even when my motivation is decidedly lacking. However, this latest read got me thinking
about the nature of these group reading challenges. Perhaps these types of
literary sprints are best left to the young’ns.
Hear me out:
It’s
hard to devote nine hours a day of focused reading when you have a job and
responsibilities to home and family.
Free time is luxury good that is in short supply when you get older. I’m sorry, I can’t participate in a reading
sprint when, you know, I am at work helping nontraditional students format
their term papers. Soz, folks.
Also,
has anyone else noticed that a majority of the people on BookTube who post
about their epic week of five novel readin’ have usually read Young Adult
novels? Don’t get me wrong, I love YA
lit more fervently today than I did when I was a teenager, but reading a YA
novel is easier than reading literary fiction.
I’m not saying that literary fiction is better than YA, but you have to
read literary fiction differently, slowly, in order to fully grasp the
content. So, really, forty-odd pages of Siri
Hustvedt isn’t the same as forty-pages of John Green. Sorry, it’s not.
What
would a literary fiction reading challenge look like? What would the parameters be?
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