It’s called prosopagnosia. I have it and can’t picture faces at all even if I’ve seen them before many times (like myself or my mother or father or twin sister).
It’s actually one of the reasons I like books more than movies. You don’t have to recognize anyone (which I’ve always struggled to in movies especially if characters have the same height, gender, and hair color). Just let go of the urge to and follow the characters using their names.
As in “acerbic wit”?
And yes, some words stand out. In several of his books including the Imager series, the Corean Chronicles, and his latest Councillor series, LE Modesitt Jr uses the word “eased” a lot.
When I first noticed it, he was doing it in the context of a horse being ridden. Eg. “Alucius eased the gray around the quarasote.” It felt pretty natural to me. When I read his latest series and the same thing was used to describe a steam powered car being driven, it caught my attention. And then on a re-read of Imager, I noticed it was being applied to people’s movement too.
Obviously, I don’t have that big of a problem with it since I keep reading his books.
Do you want the average or the median? It doesn’t take a lot of 100+ a book a year readers to skew the average.
I’d guess 0, 1, or 2 is the median. I’m sure 0 is the mode. And I’d be surprised if the average isn’t around 10.
And for readers your phase of life and how busy you are impacts reading a lot. My reading for fun has varied from 25 books as my low in college and law school to about 400 when I was in late middle school and early high school. Now, as an adult without kids, it varies from 50-100 and about a third of those are listened to using headphones while doing other things.
We’ll definitely have to agree to disagree. It was one of my least favorite books when I read it as a child.
I don’t have a problem with teaching kids to be kind, loyal, just, and merciful. I don’t even have a problem with teaching kids values directly using the Bible or the Quran or the Torah or whatever as long as it isn’t at a public school.
What I do have a problem with is forcing kids to read a poorly written book. That’s the kind of thing that risks turning a potential lifelong reader into someone who hates books.
I’d have been willing to overlook being bashed over the head with the symbolism of the reincarnation of Aslan, the stone table, the Garden-of-Eden-style temptation of the Turkish Delight, the Cain and Abel plotline being rammed down our throats with Edmund, etc all of which I immediately identified when reading the book as a second grader who grew up Catholic.
But at a minimum, there had to be some passably well-written complex characters I could care about and some dialogue that resembled a real conversation. And there wasn’t. Instead, we were left with pitiful caricatures of kids just barely sufficient to construct a web of thinly veiled symbolism on top of.
And parents then foist that pitiful excuse for storytelling on children with the non-logic that if it’s so heavily inspired by Christianity, it must be good.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I don’t understand why they force kids to read it. It feels like you are being unendingly beaten over the head with third-rate Christian propaganda. The characters are one-dimensional. The writing is poor. The dialogue is stilted.
If they want to indoctrinate kids, I’d much rather that they either directly assigned the Bible or picked a better allegory like Moby Dick.
I’m not sure. I don’t really want a weapon.
Needle was my favorite character in Game of Thrones.
And Brisingr would be pretty to look at when I said it’s name.
But if I were actually using it, I’d rather have some ranged weapon. Maybe a bow. I’m not sure which novel, but one of the various iterations of Cupid’s bow would be fun.
I’ve also always liked atlatls.
I think my mom did a great job with my sister and me. She read stories to us. And we always wanted more. Eventually, that turned into us reading stories to her and on our own. Afterward, we would talk about the stories and maybe discuss lessons from them. We’d also go to the library together and pick the books out. I don’t think parents should wait for school to teach their children to read when it’s going to be about quizzes and grades.
Comfort may not quite be the right word. But A Journal of the Plague Year by Defoe and The Plague by Camus put things into perspective.
Things like rats fighting each other for food because the restaurants closed were suddenly more explicable.
And refrigerated trucks with bodies in NYC seemed more reasonable compared to streets choked with dead bodies.
I also found reading about Yellow Fever, the Spanish Flu, Malaria, immunological privilege, differential immunity’s impact on wars, revolutionary war inoculation campaigns, the history of quarantines, etc very interesting. The Spanish Flu in particular had a lot of parallels right down to the immediate embrace of cloth mask mandates with no evidence that they slowed spread.
It depends on why you buy them.
But, yes, buying books to show them off on a shelf or because you like being surrounded by books or something is probably in some sense materialistic.
After all, you could get ebooks or borrow them from your library or something like that.
For example, I will normally read ebooks or library books but then buy the ones that heavily influenced my thinking. Part of it is so I can reread them. But mostly I want to display them on a shelf both for other people to know what matters to me and so I feel surrounded by these pieces of myself. I think both of those are materialistic goals.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with being somewhat materialistic though.
I’m not sure I’d call it the worst, but Eragon was pretty disappointing. Part of it was that the dragon didn’t look realistic (along with basically everything else).
But the bigger problem was that none of the characters felt real. Brom was disappointing. So was Roran. And Arya. And every other character. The mental communication also just felt wrong in the movie.