How do you go about reading a doorstopper...

How do you go about reading a doorstopper? Do you commit to reading that book and focus your time reading only that book or do you go in and out of reading that book and alternate with a smaller book or two?

usually stop halfway-ish through most big-ass books and read something completley different and shorter, sometimes even a couple books
only big-ass book i ever read all the way through was infinite jest but that's not really a compliment to it i just wanted to be done with it

just keep looking at the next word

...

How do I read a doorstopper in a week?

>he looks at individual words rather than processing multiple sentences at a time

I read 10 pages a book per book across multiple books per sitting

Take your sweet goddamn time, and break it up with something else. I read two or three other books while I was reading Anna Karenina

100 pages each day
unless ur a neet like me

read approximately one seventh of it every day.

Read smaller books if it's something that you haven't gotten into yet, if its a classic your struggling to enjoy try breaking it up with other books. I advise once you hit some momentum and engage with the text you push through until you finish. No shame in leaving it for a while and coming back, as long as you come back.

>>unless ur a neet like me
??

i devote all my reading time to the single book, i spent eight solid weeks reading infinite jest.

Did you feel accomplished?

honestly yes.

I tend to focus all my reading time on that one book, unless if it's an academic book then I'll read it, taking breaks and read a smaller book alongside.

>he reads sentences, rather than parsing each chapter as a discrete idea
>not flexing your brain by absorbing the liber essentia through touch alone

Since the Brothers Karamazov was serially published, I would rest for a few days between 'books' (big chapters). Sometimes I would read multiple 'books' in one sitting, other times I would only read one-a-day. For something like Don Quixote, I paused for almost a month between Part I and Part II. I rammed Locke's ass when I read the Essay, spending the whole day writing margin notes and underlining for hundreds of pages.

The main thing is, read a doorstopper that interests you, not for attention's sake.

Uh.. how often and to what extent do people write notes, enter group readings, read supplementary material and reading guides, etc? Does being averse to doing these kinds of things- although I mostly read economics and politics, not full-on epistemology or great works of fiction (although I'd like to eventually get to material like that)- make me a brainlet or experiencing the works on some kind of lower level, not retaining the information as well, etc? I'd hope not, and only beginning to write notes now would leave me only with summations & documentation of that which I'd read beyond a certain point in time would would suck.

Re: The Brothers Karamazov and other novels, I never take margin notes and rarely underline passages. I only underline passages that I'd like to memorize or otherwise recite, and dog-ear the best pages. The Oxford World's Classics generally have good, succinct introductions, which is the only secondary lit I read. Shakespeare is on a different level, so I'll do all kinds of crazy shit to my text and read a lot of secondary lit — Norton Critical Editions are a great start for this purpose.

Pic related is my Locke. I never did this to Plato or Kierkegaard; this treatment is reserved for the moderns and Aquinastotle. Amphetamines help a lot with this practice — I used to cringe at marking books. Some books are too dense to take notes separately, or else the immediacy is lost.

The mighty NEET brain can ingest massive quantities of text with an ease the wageslave can only envy