Reading Frequency
Dec. 13th, 2020 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unspeakablehorrorYesterday I started working on finishing up The Broken Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin and also thinking about why I don't read as much as an adult. I think there's actually a number of factors that go into that.
One is that I don't tend to read just a little bit at a time. Once I take up a book, I prefer to focus most of my time and energy on it until I finish it. But as an adult, I tend to have fewer large blocks of time like that available.
There's also more things I can get absorbed in doing as an adult. Though I spent a lot of time on other activities as a kid, too, because I've always had a wide variety of interests. But I can get more rewarding results with a wider range of my skills today, so I have more incentive to sink extra time into them.
Another factor is that I generally read for escapism when I was younger and for a number of reasons, including some of my personal circumstances improving (even if others...got worse) and my coping skills improving, I don't feel as much need for that as I used to. So, ironically, I think my life getting better has also caused me to read less often.
My tastes in fiction and my expectations for stories have also changed as I've gotten older, so even though I read a lot of adult novels as a kid, I've still had to navigate finding new authors to get into as an adult. Whereas my strategy as a kid was to find some author who had written a long series and start reading their books, read the backlog, and then just keep reading the new ones as they came out. I was primarily concerned with the story having an exciting plot and/or with it having a cast of recurring characters I liked.
Despite all this, I guess I might still read more than average even if I don't read as many books in a year. And even if I still don't reread works very often, I tend to ruminate on what I've read more than I did when I was younger.
At the same time, not all of my tastes have changed. My favorite genres are still sci-fi and fantasy, though I seem to lean a bit more heavily toward sci-fi now, whereas I leaned somewhat more heavily towards fantasy as a child.
One is that I don't tend to read just a little bit at a time. Once I take up a book, I prefer to focus most of my time and energy on it until I finish it. But as an adult, I tend to have fewer large blocks of time like that available.
There's also more things I can get absorbed in doing as an adult. Though I spent a lot of time on other activities as a kid, too, because I've always had a wide variety of interests. But I can get more rewarding results with a wider range of my skills today, so I have more incentive to sink extra time into them.
Another factor is that I generally read for escapism when I was younger and for a number of reasons, including some of my personal circumstances improving (even if others...got worse) and my coping skills improving, I don't feel as much need for that as I used to. So, ironically, I think my life getting better has also caused me to read less often.
My tastes in fiction and my expectations for stories have also changed as I've gotten older, so even though I read a lot of adult novels as a kid, I've still had to navigate finding new authors to get into as an adult. Whereas my strategy as a kid was to find some author who had written a long series and start reading their books, read the backlog, and then just keep reading the new ones as they came out. I was primarily concerned with the story having an exciting plot and/or with it having a cast of recurring characters I liked.
Despite all this, I guess I might still read more than average even if I don't read as many books in a year. And even if I still don't reread works very often, I tend to ruminate on what I've read more than I did when I was younger.
At the same time, not all of my tastes have changed. My favorite genres are still sci-fi and fantasy, though I seem to lean a bit more heavily toward sci-fi now, whereas I leaned somewhat more heavily towards fantasy as a child.