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saxonvoter) wrote2019-02-12 10:01 pm
If a body catch a body comin’ through the rye...
I want to get interested in reading published books again, because I'm still contemplating what I want to do as my career and literature has sort of always been there in the background, tempting me and calling my name and whatnot. I don't have a problem with reading per say, but I mostly read fanfiction these days. I used to read a lot when I was in middle school and high school, but then I just sort of... lost interest in reading published books, because fanfiction was just more up my alley. The tagging system on AO3 makes it so easy to find stories I know I'll actually enjoy.
I decided I should start chipping away at my reading list, or at least try to get more educated about "the classics" in some other way, if possible. This led to me watching John Green's Crash Course on Literature.
This afternoon I watched the two videos on J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. Now, I've had this book on my hella long reading list for ages since I know it's an American classic, but I've never really been in the mood to read it. But the videos aroused my interest, so I downloaded the ebook and started reading.
And to my surprise, once I started reading, I couldn't stop. The only breaks I took were because I wanted to bake some bread from a recipe I had found few days earlier, but that only took couple of short breaks. The recipe required almost 3 hours of just waiting around for the dough to rise and it to bake in the oven, so I managed to read the whole book in one evening.
I actually really enjoyed the book and found myself heavily empathizing with the main character. I also highlighted some passages which I found especially good, so I thought I'd share two of them with y'all.
First this:
I hope to hell when I do die somebody has sense enough to just dump me in the river or something. Anything except sticking me in a goddam cemetery. People coming and putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, and all that crap. Who wants flowers when you’re dead? Nobody.
And then another one:
“All right, name something else. Name something you’d like to be. Like a scientist. Or a lawyer or something.”
“I couldn’t be a scientist. I’m no good in science.”
“Well, a lawyer - like Daddy and all.”
“Lawyers are all right, I guess - but it doesn’t appeal to me,” I said. “I mean they’re all right if they go around saving innocent guys’ lives all the time, and like that, but you don’t do that kind of stuff if you’re a lawyer. All you do is make a lot of dough and play golf and play bridge and buy cars and drink Martinis and look like a hot-shot. And besides. Even if you did go around saving guys’ lives and all, how would you know if you did it because you really wanted to save guys’ lives, or because you did it because what you really wanted to do was be a terrific lawyer, with everybody slapping you on the back and congratulating you in court when the goddam trial was over, the reporters and everybody, the way it is in the dirty movies? How would you know you weren’t being a phony? The trouble is, you wouldn’t.”
That's about it. I don't really have any analysis or anything for these bits, I just really liked them.
What ended up happening after I read the books is that I realized how short most published books actually are. I've been thinking that they're really long because that's how they felt when I was a kid, but these days I regularly consume like 400,000 word long fanfiction in almost one sitting. Bolstered by this realization, I ended up making a new account on GoodReads and set myself a challenge of reading 50 books in 2019.
Now, if you excuse me, I'm going to eat some of that bread.
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Reading fifty books in the year sounds like a good goal--I try to read as much as I can, but I'm very preoccupied. Maybe I ought to set a goal like that for myself?
As a small sidenote, 400,000 words in one sitting...ye gods, I'm a fast reader, but I'm not quite that fast. I marvel at your ability.
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To be honest, I can't give an accurate time frame for how long a 400,000 word story would take me to read since it depends so much on the subject matter, type of writing, and how much I focus on remembering little details. (Not to mention that often when I read fics this long it's usually the weekend/my day off, so I might not go to sleep at all and therefore totally lose track of the passage of time.) A dialogue heavy story would be a lot faster to read than one with a lot of description and explanation. Of course, fanfiction is based on already familiar characters and settings so that might make a difference as well when compared to traditional prose, since IMO it's easier to get into and understand without having to think too deeply.
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Oh, definitely. I think interest can also definitely change the reading pace--I've always been a lot faster reading something I really like, but I suppose that's a given. And certainly, given that it's based on a source material, 'fic can easily cut worldbuilding and introductions, though I've certainly seen 'fic that can be read without necessarily knowing the source material.
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I'd revisit Catcher and the Rye, but essentially everything I read in a high school class aside from To Kill a Mockingbird was pretty thoroughly ruined for me. Now whenever I think about Salinger I think about "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" because that's where the classic manga Banana Fish derives it's title.
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I've been meaning to start watching Banana Fish the anime. It was all over Animate when I visited Japan!
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