ITT: Pretend we're /r/books

holy... I want more.

holy...

...I want more

so I'll know if I skipped a worthwhile line when all of a sudden I stop and say to myself the imagery is not right. I missed something. So I look back to the text. A few lines above. I see a word. It's a new word. That means I skipped it. That means I either have to A) make a decision to re-read it, which is tricky because I really didn't read it in the first place. or B) just bypass through and continue where I was.
Its more of a stumbling process. But occasionally I'll find myself having blasted through lines of text and not even caring. Saying it wasn't worthwhile because the pictures there. I got it. no need to add emphasis. the prose is working. even with skim reading and that's how I know it doesn't matter whether or not to skip because if I'm reading the pages, even lightly, and have a picture in my head and the story is going guess what? I'm happy. It's when I'm not happy and want a fuller picture that I go back and re-read and that's when things get real happy. too happy, perhaps.
I guess my material will be succinct huh? Its cool, I really like succinct things.
TL;DR: there is a difference between reading an envisioning. I generally consider good reading to be a processes of envisioning. If the words don't add up, I don't do the math, and guess what? I didn't read it.

1984 is totally happening today!

You know, we have a bunch of plebs and retards on this board, but I've never seen anything nearly as bad as this. How these people make it through life, i'll never know.

holy...I want more

I just completed Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and am currently writing an essay on it and I would like feedback regarding a thesis that will do this book justice. So far I have:
What can one truly say about the atrocious acts of violence committed during the second world war? “...All there is to say about a massacre, things like Poo-tee-weet” (Vonnegut, 19). In Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, the author proclaims, through various satirical undertones, the absurdity of war through the depiction of the character Edgar Derby using him as the crux of the novel to also highlight the inevitability of such events, like the firebombing of Dresden.

Thoughts? Any critique is appreciated. Thank you all very much, big fan of this board.

I admire John Green's prose.

The Count of Monte Cristo is literature, and not just comparitively well-written genre fiction.

I just finished “The History of the Siege of Lisbon” by Jose Saramago, and prior to that I abandoned “A Brief History of Seven Killings” by Marlon James.
I found them both hard to follow for different reasons. In James’ work the character’s dialog and voices were difficult to distinguish and to follow. In Saramago’s work I found the long paragraphs with no dialog breaks to be difficult and distracting.
As I was reading both works, I kept wondering why is the author trying to make this so difficult to read. Why don’t they focus on their story and characters and quit trying to be “artsy” with the format. As a classically trained engineer, this has often been an issue of mine with many works of “high literature”. The form trumps the function. Strange diction presented poorly (James) or obfuscating layout of action and dialog (Saramago) seemed to be click-bait for literary prizes (Booker for “Seven Killings”, and Nobel for Saramago).
I wondered if I was just being a simpleton and missing some deeper meaning or artistic base-note. Was it really the case that they were communicating something with these impediments to flow? Then I read the end-note in “Siege of Lisbon” and had my suspicions confirmed (at least about Saramago) that his willful muddling of the text was simply for attention.
In the afterward to the Harcourt edition of “Siege”, Giovanni Pontiero writes: “As in his other novels, Saramago’s paragraph-long sentences, minimally interrupted by punctuation , challenge the reader to follow his continuous stream of thought, thus permitting a stronger sense of interaction and a more divers interpretation of phrases and clauses.” Note: "a stronger sense of interaction". So basically, what Pontiero is saying is that Saramago wrote in a difficult way so the reader has to slow down and figure out what is happening in the dialog (who is speaking and when) and action (switching between the 21st and 12th centuries).
If this is truly Saramago’s aim, and I suspect it is, that’s really annoying. Instead of making the story and characters so compelling that our attention is held, the author decided to just make it difficult to read and so we must decipher each block of text as if translating from Pretentious English into Normal English. I suspect that the difficulties with James’ book stem from the same literary motivation.

ugh I just LOVE Harry Potter

Translations?

Heck, sign me the f***k up!

how to pick up girls at barnes and nobles?

- BukowskiBoy22

There are several things I do - most of them I don't do when I'm reading for work vs pleasure reading.

first, a trick taught to me in a 'speed reading' class back in middle school, my eyes do not track across the entire page. They track in a column down the center of each page, and my peripheral vision catches the words along the edges.

Second, I don't read each word as if I were hearing it. For example, if I see 'big blue box', I'll picture the Tardis instead of hearing each word individually. So it's not like hearing someone telling me about a scene (on fast-forward), it's more like having my eyes scan a movie scene - it only takes a second for you to get the picture, whereas a person describing it would take much longer. Dialog, however, I tend to read at normal talking speed - and it really irritates me if the author doesn't put in the appropriate punctuation to indicate that speed - commas and such to indicate natural pauses.

Also, when I'm recreation-reading, I don't necessarily read every single paragraph. Many times an author will include details of a setting when the setting isn't really all that important to the story. Or they'll post a long soliloquy about a character's internal debate about something and all I really care about is that the character is having that internal debate. So those times, I'll scan the paragraphs for important details, but mostly skip those paragraphs. Yes, sometimes that means I'll miss an 'important' detail and I'll have to go back - but 9 times out of 10 I don't. And to me personally, all of those unimportant details make the book more boring - so skipping them makes me enjoy the book more (while I also realize that to some other readers, those passages add value).

And last but not least, practice. I am a voracious reader. I no longer consciously translate the written word into spoken English. Perhaps it's because I'm more of a visual learner. Some people are auditory learners, so they effectively have to translate the written word 'box' into the memory of the spoken word 'box' which then translates to meaning cube-like structure - whereas I skip the middle step and go from written directly to meaning.

I used to do this desu.

Okay, this one is the worst

the thing I hate the most about Reddit is how there is always a chain of references at the top of every thread.
It's just like 20 posts that each continue a famous quote or so funny conversation from a tv show or something.
Just fucking 20 2 word posts with 1000 upvotes each.

I read