It's a hypnotic state. How else can you imagine a world while your eyes rapidly scanning pages of words?
I was a voracious reader of fiction as a child, and in a way immersed myself in books too. But, I never really considered whether other readers are having an accompanying visual experience that isn't just pages and pages of typesetting. I also went through a phase of reading a lot of poetry, and was a bit of an outsider because my experience of it is also as text on a page, not some reconstructed audio performance.
On the reading speed topic, I don't have any performance metrics for myself but it seemed I was pretty fast and comprehensive compared to peers. I definitely lean towards the gestalt parser side of things, taking in phrases or larger blocks of text rather than scanning one word at a time.
As an adult, I've noticed that this ability seems to be more content dependent than I originally understood. If I encounter truly unfamiliar writing styles, or even unfamiliar typesetting conventions, I can find myself getting "disoriented" and having to go back. It's like my visual parsing and lexical parsing pipeline tosses up some kind of "parity" error and I have to go back and try again.
I think this reading stall also happens more often with non-fiction, and wonder if that's because I mostly assimilated fiction idioms. So my brain has more trouble predicting and assembling texts that follow other structures. But also, the non-fiction I encounter is more often written by international authors with English as a second language. So that may also shift grammar and prose conventions...
I read words all day, everyday on a computer. I have read hundreds if not thousands of non-fiction books but for fiction in the last 30 years, have only read 1984.
It is like a club that I am not dressed for to gain admission. I am just not able to get into the story. 1984 was different though because I think I was half in the story, half comparing things to actual reality.
It really sucks because works like The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace are just completely impossible for me and I know how much I am missing out.
All the great classic science fiction...tried many times, failed many times, know how much I am missing out.
Another idea could be poetry. I particularly love romantic poetry (referring to the era and style here, not the genre) which is on the longer side. So, maybe W.B.Yeats[Second Coming], John Keats[Endymion, Hyperion], P.B. Shelly[Hymn to Intellectual Beauty].
These formats are in stark contrast to a novel in that their "plots" are simpler to digest, and these are often shorter, focusing much more on how the reader experiences themes and emotions.
Building on the idea, I think movies probably stimulate the same sense, except compared to books they do most of the imagining for you.
Some say audio books are a cop out, but they can really carry you through a story you wouldn't be able to finish otherwise. And as the saying goes, anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.
But really there are no roolz. It comes down to doing what you enjoy. Try to find fiction that plays to your interests and lean into it, see where it goes.
That said it's often just entertainment / mental junk food, not some great virtuous act like it's frequently portrayed by libraries / kids shows / lit majors.
There’s really all the difference in the world if you can sit still and focus on a good engaging long-form work. I think most folk are losing the discipline to do that, as we all communicate in brief spurts of async messaging and anything published for mass consumption is written at a 4th grade level
I try to read novels in chapter length segments. It’s hard to avoid to urge to context switch or get distracted
i do not think this is discipline so much as inclination. I never had to discipline myself to read a book I enjoyed (whether fiction or non-fiction). Some books grip me so much it takes discipline to but the down.
What this seems to show is that long form reading has significant effects on your brain, developing the ability to read long form. I am not clear on whether they have shown which way the causality runs: maybe having a brain adapted to long form reading just makes you more likely to do it. It could even run both ways?
I guess it depends on intent. Reading a fiction epub in an app is different from reading HN threads with 500+ comments.
even paper books suck compared to kindle, which saves space, access to billions of books in a comfortable way to read. (can't read brother karamazov laying in bed)