The novel is about, for me, sustained and organized looking. I do think that people have a hunger for a sustained engagement, that concentration that the book can offer.
I suppose I could read more fiction, but I haven't moved in that direction. I'd like more time even though I spend six hours a day reading. People say their eyes get tired, but I've never experienced that. In college I used to read 10 hours a day. My wife says I'm obsessive compulsive. She might have a point because when I was an undergrad student we had the required reading list and the suggested reading list. I always read all the suggested reading too.
If I'm really immersed in a story, I try to finish it in a few days. If it's a longer work, then it would take a few months.
There'll be times when the only refuge is books. Then you'll read as if you meant it, as if your life depended on it.
I was engrossed with the book, I was having difficulties with it, and I just didn't notice the years were going by.
Today we read books 'extensively,' often without sustained focus, and with rare exceptions we read each book only once. We value quantity of reading over quality of reading. We have no choice, if we want to keep up with the broader culture.
I kind of go in waves with reading. Sometimes I read all the time, and sometimes I can't get settled enough to focus.
When a novel has 200,000 words, then it is possible for the reader to experience 200,000 delights, and to turn back to the first page of the book and experience them all over again, perhaps more intensely.
Children make better readers than adults. They read as carefully as I write; adults read as a means of getting off to sleep. I get letters saying 'I have read your book seventeen times.' If you're an adult novelist and you get that letter, you should be afraid. You're being stalked. Kids always read them seventeen times!
Whatever I read went under my skin. I almost devoured the literature, which became like a road to discovery.
I used to read three books a day, sometimes.
I do like books to be quite an intense experience, and that's the kind of novel I respond to as a reader.
To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don't read the novel, really.
Reading is so private, and it is often a reader's habit to finish a book, close the covers, and plunge into the next one without a backward glance.
Video games just can't compare with the variety and intensity of reading.
Well, PT Anderson sent me a script of Boogie Nights which I let lay around my house for about three months, then one day I'm cleaning my office and decided that I'd better read this before the guy calls me back. I never put it down, bro.
I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.
I spend 12 hours a day reading on most days of the year.
