/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22569695]

>find a book I want to read
>can't start because I have to finish this other book that I want to read
>but I can't finish it because there are another 3 books that I have started that I might as well start from the beginning because it's been years since I started them
Leaving my retardation aside, can /lit/ share more about how it handles its own backlogs, how to deal with juggling multiple books, if you often drop books or restart them or simply pick them back up years later from where you stopped, etc.

Any software, multiple instances or devices, tabs, digital bookmarks you use to stay on track?

As a child I used to easily read 300 pages of literature a week, but the Internet has made me weak.

[Anonymous No.22569735]

I give any book I pick up a dozen or so pages to see if I like it before dropping it.
If I leave a book halfway through I don't mind, maybe I'll pick it up again, maybe not.
There's so many fucking books out there, forcing myself to finish one for whatever reason feels absurd. Either it catches my attention or not. There's probably another book out there that either does a better job at communicating the same idea or presents something entirely new and is more interesting.
I used to have a Goodreads profile, but now I just keep a txt file with books I want to read, books dropped and books I've read.

[Anonymous No.22569740]

>>22569735
I have a problem where I don't really enjoy things on a visceral level.
Entertainment and study have always been things I have to set myself to do.

So it can be very hard to tell whether or not I'm enjoy the book. Most of the time I feel like I am, even when I don't have the drive to come back to it.

[Anonymous No.22569761]

>>22569740
I know that feel.
I've just decided that if I don't have the drive to go back to it then I shouldn't, no matter how good, interesting or even valuable the book is.
I've found books that I couldn't put down, that I read for hours on end and I finished in a matter of days. There are many more out there like that, so I rather find those.

[Anonymous No.22569849]

>>22569695
I have the same problem
when I was a child I read everything in my house cause I had a ton of free time and and internet was still unavailable
So the solution is just cut off internet maybe ?

[Anonymous No.22569854]

>>22569761
What if I haven't found anything in a decade?

I have a cousin who's the opposite, he has read 123098123901823 (Japanese) novels and then he got bored so he started reading 12039292 (Japanese) webnovels, but then he go bored and started reading Chinese novels and Wuxia, until he burned out and now he doesn't enjoy anything.

In my case I enjoy everything but always in this low energy way, doesn't matter the genre, fiction or nonfiction, written or musical or visual.
But I feel like the weight of knowing how much I haven't read yet can play a role in this constant fatigue.

>>22569849
When I took a week away in a farm, I took with me a book and read it, but still only for a couple hours a day.
Having no distractions helps, definitely, but I wouldn't be able to read for 16 hours in a row like I did as a kid sometimes.

[Anonymous No.22569874]

>>22569695
My system is simple: I have make a list of the media I'm going through. I can start as many as I want. At the end of the day I write down how far in each piece I got. At the end of the week if I didn't engage with something for at least 5 days I drop it. There's been several times where I drop 4-5 things a week. You'll have slump periods like this and it's okay. Learn to value a drop list as part of your backlog autism.

[Anonymous No.22569909]

>>22569874
I bought a t*blet and I will set some time aside for daily reading away from my computer.
Might as well implement this idea, anon, I like it.

Do you archive your drops or just delete them from your list?
Have you gone back to stuff you dropped later and enjoyed it better?

[Anonymous No.22570038]

>>22569909
I deleted the stuff I dropped off my list. My rationale was that if it's something that's meant to be I'll come across it again. A lot of stuff I put on my media lists simply because it was part of a whim or phase at the time. For example, getting interested in Portuguese lit through Pessoa but then never following up on the recommended books related to him. Honestly dropping has been a pretty good habit for me since my curiosity leads me to opening up the paths that end up just being a source of intellectual anxiety. I do recommend to keep a drop list unlike what I did. I myself wouldn't have made much use of the media I dropped but I often come across situations where someone else has an interest like I did and I could have recommended the stuff I came across.

Back in my early 20s I dropped a lot of older movies I tried getting into from /tv/ recs, but now that I'm learning French I went back to them and have been enjoying them a lot more.

[Anonymous No.22571098]

imagine reading kek