Pure unadulterated potential for something special…that’s what.

I've loved every one of her books. If you dislike them so much, stop reading them. I'm sure you can find other books that aren't so "girl bossy" to your liking.

Audiobooks make these kinds of books go faster for me personally.

I track my reading on an app called Bookly and love it! It gives great data and infographics on your reading.

I break it down to multiple smaller reading sessions a day. Say it's 300 page book and I have to/want to be done it in 5 days, I'd read 30 pages twice a day or 20 pages 3 times a day. It's usually not too annoying reading that little at a time and the book still gets finished quickly.

Idk how old you are but kudos to you if you are under 30. I think the goals you have in this endeavor should be implemented by all for it is easy (speaking for myself) to utterly forget books you've read. Only in my 50s have I started to keep track and make notes about my reading material.

A used bookstore that I had been going to since I was a little kid was my first job out of college.

I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed working there. Didn’t really mesh well with my coworkers and absolutely hated my role.

BUT- the books are dirt cheap and I’ve never left that place with less than several books and if it weren’t for the fact that I moved and have another used bookstore half the distance would still drop $20-$30 there in a heartbeat.

If you aren't 'a reader' then starting with dense allegorical 1800s Russian literature is setting yourself up for failure. Read fun stuff and start to push your boundries from there. Your tactic is like if you'd never seen a film since childhood so you decide to start with 1960s new wave french arthouse films. A bold choice, but very likely to just bore and confuse you.

I learned to be a reader from my dad. He used to grab anything handy and read it us as kids - newspapers, magazines, poetry books, the bible, shakespeare plays, comic books, anything.

What I learned and is most fundamental to my reading pleasure is - it doesn't matter WHAT you read, so long as you read.

By being a consistent reader, your vocabulary will increase greatly, your comprehension will grow by leaps and bounds, and your ability to write will improve.

I credit my love of reading for helping me get several short stories published, and even in college my writing professors were impressed, commenting that they looked forward to reading my papers no matter what I wrote about.

So - just do it. Even if it means picking up a graphic novel or a comic, and starting there. Hell I still read horror comics for fun, and I'm 63 now, and I never want to stop.

J.D. Salinger also fought in World War 2 (I believe he was at D-Day and freed Dachau). I think a lot of his pessimism stems from the that. Once he found spirituality his outlook changed a bit, that’s why the Glass Family stories are different despite the fact they deal with similar characters/themes.

I honestly cannot talk about this book without summoning some sort of primal rage!

It really is, I do that often.

Yes goodreads and because

Try "The Civil War", a huge set of books put out by Time Life. Illustrations are awesome as well.

Maybe start with just books that sound fun or are less 'high brow'?

Is there any film or show you particularly like? If so see if there's a book version and start out with reading that.

When I moved to the Storygraph I used a Goodreads export. If I remember correctly, I just had to delete some extraneous columns and (maybe?) re-arrange some others. It was certainly worth doing over recreating the data from scratch, and I didn't have 4000 books!

I agree that Goodreads could do better with recommendations, but I keep wishing that Netflix's recommendations would come up to the Goodreads standard.

Master & Margarita reads quite well I found. A fairly quicker one to get through, and it has a lot of re-read value

Ambient music for me. Especially those which capture the tone of the novel. Some examples if anyone is interested:

Brian Eno's "Music for Airports" while reading The Great Gatsby

Eluvium's "Talk Amongst the Trees" while reading The Handmaid's Tale

Deathprod's "Morals and Dogma's" while reading 'Salem's Lot

I have mixed feelings about David Mitchell's books. I LOVED Ghostwritten, Cloud Atlas, and The Bone Clocks. But I hated Number9dream. It was all over the place and never really came together. I thought 1000 autumns was ok. I can see how Slade House is a good book, but it was too creepy for my tastes. I have a copy of Utopia Avenue and I'm kind of afraid to start it - not sure if it will be a David Mitchell hit or miss for me.

He's an amazing and imaginative writer though. Even Number9dream had beautiful writing even though I didn't like the story overall.

Yeah I'm a big Jazz fan when reading.

I mostly listen to them in the car or while shopping and sometimes cooking. In the car, they can be through the speakers. Otherwise I have to have them playing through ear buds. If I don’t, I lose focus as well.

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Great book, a friend swears by rereading it every other year, says he always gets a different resonance from it based on where he is in his life. Not my favorite but it’s definitely one of the better classics

Yeah I know what you mean. I need a break between reading classics - I usually have a couple of easy reads that I can blitz through to keep me reading

My list has evolved from paper to Goodreads + a spreadsheet (data redundancy) to Storygraph + spreadsheet.

I dread the day that Storygraph becomes the place to go crap on books you haven't read because you don't like some aspect of the author's politics, which is the primary reason I left Goodreads. At least on the Storygraph the social element is available but feels less in-your-face.

Goodreads still tends to be where I go to read the description, get series info, etc, but I use a fake email when I do.