Slowing Down

Last month I read 14 books. The main reason for this was I listened to a bunch of eight hour audio books and read quick read novels. This month I found myself on the same pace but was missing the characters from The Wheel of Time series. I wanted to return to that world and spend some time with those folks. At the end of last week I started the third novel in that series and today I just passed the halfway point.

I should finish that book before October ends but that means I will read 12 or 13 books this month. It is shy of 14 but not by much. The fact is I could have read more. If I actively picked books based on their audio book length or ease of reading then I am willing to bet I could read 200 books in a year. The fact is I don’t want to.

Slowing down is good. Reading longer and more difficult books is good sometimes. I mention the difficulty of the reading not because The Dragon Reborn is a hard read it is just that it is just shy of 600 pages. Around the same length as a Lincoln Lawyer novel but a Lincoln Lawyer novel has bigger font, smaller pages, and many other factors that make its 600 pages not the same as The Dragon Reborn and it is hard to describe that.

Anyway the point is if I were to read almost nothing but shorter mystery novels, westerns, and perhaps a few quick sci-fi reads thrown in there I could read 200 books in a year. I thought for a bit that this wasn’t a possibility as it would take an insane number of hours to read 200 books but I wasn’t thinking of them as the right 200 books.

The issue here is if I were to do that I would be picking books for length more than content and that is no way to read. The nearly 300 pages I have read in The Dragon Reborn could have been three much shorter books but would I have enjoyed that time as much? Would it have satisfied me? And wouldn’t I still be missing these characters?

The answer to that is no, maybe, and yes. For that reason I have to say that slowing down and reading a longer and slower book is a very wise decision indeed.