01-14-2017, 03:52 PM
(01-14-2017, 03:23 PM)TeacherinExile Wrote:(01-14-2017, 02:39 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:Quote:Kudos, man. (Cue stale cinematic and cultural reference.) I'd have to be "Good Will Hunting" to keep up that pace.
Cheers! And nonsense, man, I go through at least a couple of books a week. I generally find that interspersing new (nonfiction) prose material with fiction and rereads of old favorites (fiction or not) helps alleviate mental exhaustion. And it's amazing how much time you free up when you don't watch television or play videogames.
You should try it.
I'm retired now, and I still can't keep up that pace. And "dense" reading challenges me as never before. As much as I laughed out loud at times while wading through Cervantes' Don Quixote, I gave up halfway through. The many vignettes, strung together one after the other, became too ponderous.
Your choice. Early Modern writing styles can be fairly... dense. It takes a fair amount of work and acclimatization for modern readers to deal with. I happen to like "big" history, which makes books like the ones I listed above more bearable, and I still make a point of switching back and forth between them and reading SF/stuff on the Internet to stay balanced. And genuine historical texts, as opposed to contemporary (for 20th century values of same) books ABOUT history, are more difficult still, especially the first time through. I generally don't read them more than, at most, once a month.