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Amanda McTigue's avatar

Thanks for widening the excuses+shoulds toxic spill on reading enough for me to avoid the whole mess and start re-exploring how and why and what and where I like to read. Great suggestions from your circle as well. Many thanks.

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Henriette Lazaridis's avatar

I want to underline every word of this post. Reading should be fun. Plain and simple: fun. After decades of reading as an academic, I was overjoyed after quitting academia to be able to read without a pen in my hand. I still, years later, take no notes in a book, only occasionally dog-earing a page or typing a wonderful sentence out to save somewhere. I, too, read on an e-reader very often, in large part because of the freedom to bounce around and to abandon a book, a skill it's been hard for me to learn. I also acknowledge that I DO indeed have time to read--but I often choose to spend that time consuming narrative in visual form (because, ok, I love acting, so I love seeing that art form at the same time as the narrative). There's nothing morally bankrupt about my doing that. Nor is there anything inherently virtuous about the kind of narrative I consume, the format it's in, or how much time I spend on it at any given time. I want a book that makes me keep turning pages and makes me want to reread sentences because they're amazing. Thankfully, there are many of those out there!

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