I used to get really hung up on visualizing everything in books like they were little movies for my brain. Then I realized that’s a real disservice to literature as an art form and also wastes a lot of time while reading, so now I just let whatever comes to mind come and let everything else live there in the text. If it’s important, the author will tell you, but rarely does what a character look like matter more than their dialogue or their actions or their personality and thoughts.

Oh yeah I’ve got that up next. Saving Gravity’s Rainbow for last in case it’s so weird that it turns me off of him lol.

Thomas Pynchon. I liked Inherent Vice ok, mostly because of the setting. The Crying of Lot 49 was enjoyable enough but didn’t wow me or anything. But the setting of Against the Day really interested me so im reading that now and it’s incredible. Reminds me a lot of Red Dead Redemption 2 with its “the end of the Wild West” plotlines and some of the turn of the century technology creeping in.

Getting rid of subvocalization is a speed reading technique, not something to do if you just want to read faster but still enjoy what you’re reading. When I do this, it’s to just be able to scan the words on the page and just “understand” what I’m reading without thinking about it. You can train this by focusing on your breath rather than your thoughts, scanning steadily with your finger, and stopping every paragraph or so to summarize what you just read to test your comprehension. But this is only useful to me when I just want to get the information and am not looking to enjoy the writing whatsoever.

I find I read faster (while still being able to enjoy what I’m reading) by starting each book slowly, reading at least a good chunk of pages, 40-50, deliberately getting my inner monologue used to the sound of the author’s voice (their writing style), the setting and characters and other basic things about the story, while not getting too caught up on minute details. Once I have a feel for their writing style and get familiar with the characters, I naturally start to speed up until I don’t even think about whether I’m vocalizing in my head or not.

After finally taking my dream trip to the UK this summer and visiting Liverpool, I picked up Mark Lewisohn’s Tune In, seen as the ultimate Beatles biography, after years ago wanting to read it. And it did not disappoint.

I’ve used that momentum to keep on with longer books since and now I’m tackling another book that has long waited on my bookshelf, Infinite Jest. Longer, denser books take more time and there’s so many opportunities to lose interest and pick up something more quickly digested but I found my rhythm of making sure to read at least a good uninterrupted hour a day to keep the momentum of longer books going.

I got to John Le Carré when I was a James Bond obsessed teenager. I knew it was supposed to be more “mature” but I read multiple of his books and was bored out of my mind, but kept going try to find the good stuff.

I came back to him in my 20s and reread the books I hadn’t liked as well as a few others and found that I really enjoyed them a lot more. I just had to put some time into the workforce and the boring adult world to appreciate the kind of subtle personal dramas he writes in the midst of political and espionage settings. And I also had to not compare them to the Bond formula so much. Now he’s one of my favorite authors.

He could have cut the throwback to IT and had a tighter narrative. That’s my only real criticism of this one.