kareina: (stitched)
kareina ([personal profile] kareina) wrote2013-02-26 08:41 pm

I used to be a reader

When I was a child I spent most of my time with a nose in a book. This form of childhood mostly continued until my current decade--while I developed many other hobbies and interests over the years I still always found lots of time to spend curled up with a book. There exists no record of how many books I read in those days, but there are hundreds of books on my shelves, most of them read many times, because I have always been an addicted re-reader. At a guess I would say that I re-read four books for every one new book I read.

However, starting in 2005 I started keeping track of what I was reading. Just in time to track a huge decrease in how much I have been reading. Last year I managed only 12 books! (eight of which were in Swedish). This year isn't looking much better. I just finished my second book of the year, and the first one barely counts, since I finished it on the 6th of January, after 207 days of reading it.

Today's book completed was Kalle och choklad fabriken (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), a book I read many times in English as a child. In fact, as a child I often read it at one sitting. The Swedish version, on the other hand, just took me 57 days to complete! That hardly counts as reading at all...

[identity profile] kareina.livejournal.com 2013-02-27 07:38 pm (UTC)(link)
Nah, it does count as a decrease, as the reason it takes 57 days isn't that the reading itself is so much slower, but because I am just not putting in the hours I used to. These days I rarely read for more than 20 or 30 minutes at a time, and rarely more than one time in a day, and not every day. Does that sound like the child you raised?

[identity profile] darttn.livejournal.com 2013-02-27 09:10 pm (UTC)(link)
Only 20-30 minutes a day???? No, that does not sound like the child I raised. You have changed haven't you!

[identity profile] kareina.livejournal.com 2013-02-27 10:52 pm (UTC)(link)
life is busy!