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Comment by cafard | Hacker News Reader

"If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don’t read the novel really."

Then who but academics--or maybe graduate students--can read War and Peace, The Man Without Qualities, In Search of Lost Time (or really, most of its constituent books), Moby Dick, etc.?

And I can imagine being "partial" to calling myself a reader, but "amicable" seems the wrong word.

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That statement is just silly: Nobody read Dickens’s novels in a continuous way when they were published weekly...

Those criteria are just pseudo-culturally ego-filled statements.

Like if you do not enjoy Bach then you do not really know classical music...

Novels published serially were typically planned in parallel. Those who read them as they were published would probably have forgotten many details the author relied on them remembering by the time later chapters came out. They most likely still enjoyed the novel, but would have enjoyed it more if the end was read closer in time to the start. Naturally, they can reread earlier chapters to get the full experience. There are presumably exceptions, where the author has no real plan, and the chapters only meaningfully relate to adjacent chapters, but such works are rarely hailed as great novels.

Moby Dick can be read aloud in 24 hours (well, at least experimentally closer to 26 -- we just did it! it's super fun: https://maritime.org/events/mobydick/ ). I've read it (silently) in 12. However, I don't agree with the assertion that reading a novel requires that rapid pace to fully enjoy it, though I've personally found that I'm unable to resume reading a novel on my Kindle the way I am with a physical text.

According to https://www.staples.com/sbd/cre/marketing/technology-researc... I could read War and Peace in a little over 24 hours, and English is my third language. That should be quite doable over a period of 2 weeks.

War and Peace can be read in 90 minutes a day for two weeks. The average American watches three and a half hours of TV each day. Most people do have the time.

But not the want to use their own imagination and brains to visualize the world with which they are reading.

I used to lament my ultra-slow reading pace. Probably because it slowed down my ability to complete homework in school.

But I've since learned to appreciate how much my mind will wander inside the world of a fiction novel that I'm reading. I'll constantly stop to imagine how this place might look, how I might react to what just happened, what I might think of this character if I were witnessing this with my own eyes. It's part of the reading process for me.

Someone reading so intermittently as to not be immersed in the book or gain much from the book just sounds like someone who is trying to finish a book they don't like rather than some sort of "bad reader."

It can.

Must it?

People read at different paces in different moods.

Also watching tv is nothing compared to reading a book like W&P.

Let people decide what how and why they enjoy things, that is all I’m saying and my P, I believe.

You can also listen to all the nine symphonies of Beethoven in a day. Does that mean if you don’t then you are not enjoying them?

I definitely understand the assertion that if you take too long to experience some piece of media, it harms the experience of it in a not-insignificant way. At the extreme end, it's certainly possible to put something down so long that you can't just pick it back up again without starting over—probably most people have experienced that. It's reasonable that there is some less-insurmountable but still real harm done to the experience by stretching out reading a novel over too long a time.

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