My schizophrenic uncle, who I hadn’t seen for a few years, went off his meds and randomly showed up at our house on Christmas morning. He brought me a book wrapped in a brown paper bag. It was Chaos by James Gleick (science and philosophy of chaos theory). I was 9.
Mostly if I DNF, I do it pretty early in the book. But I count it as “read” for my Goodreads annual reading goal if I get at least 70% through. For example, if there’s a book for one of my book clubs that I hate, I’ll power through to about that point. My reading goal is just for me, so it’s helpful to know which books I spent a bunch of time on. And in most cases, if I’ve read that much of a book, I’d be able to discuss it intelligently (especially if it’s non-fiction). But if someone asked me if I read a certain book, I’d tell them I didn’t get all the way through it.
I also keep two DNF shelves on Goodreads to track books I quit early on. One is for books I DNFed because I didn’t like the book. And the other for very long books that I might finish at some point. For example, I’ve been plugging away at the complete Sherlock Holmes for some time, but there’s only so much you can read at once.
I don’t, generally.
The only times I have two copies of the same book is if I’m gifted something I already have, or lost a copy/bought a copy/found a copy.
I do have two different translations of a very small number of books: War and Peace, Beowulf, Canterbury tales. And I guess I have a complete Shakespeare (gifted, a display copy but not nice to read out of) and also individual copies of some of the plays with notes and annotations
No. I loved analyzing books and literature in class. But our school did higher quality books than yours. I don’t recall ever being assigned a book that I might have picked up and read on my own at the time. The Hunger Games is a fun book but there’s little value to teaching it, IMHO. My kids read it around age 8.
Yes. It’s very very dense. Read slowly, focus on every sentence.
When I taught high school I used to assign my AP class 30-40 pages of reading per night for most books. For Heart of Darkness, I assigned 3-4 pages per night.
I just DNF’d it. I love McCarthy and I love dark books. But this one was just too much, like the brutal violence is literally the point.
I don’t find the language any more difficult than his other books. His use of precise technical language is one of the things I admire about his writing. He expects a lot of his readers - not a ton of explanation about words or phrases you can just look up - and I always learn a lot from him. The Road was particularly good this way.
One idea is to read on a Kindle or similar where you can click on a word to get its definition.
I don’t organize it. I page through my kindle library til I find something that appeals to me at that moment. Figuring out a thing to read has never been a problem for me!