My thoughts here are not super coherent, so I apologize in advance. I know I’ve talked about my reading rate before, but I think it’s important to note that it’s an average. My rate varies significantly from book to book, and the length of the book actually has surprisingly little to do with how long it takes me. The main factor, for me, is emotional engagement.
Most books I don’t really engage with emotionally, simply intellectually. These I can breeze through very quickly. It takes me much longer to process emotions, though, and if I let a book in it will take me longer.
The question then becomes, when do I engage emotionally? Sometimes it’s because I have a favorite character with whom I really connect, but that’s not always the case.
There’s another, more important factor. I tend to get the most emotionally involved in stories about the failure of love in some way. Essentially stories where, no matter how deep, genuine, unconditional, desperate the love, it simply is not enough, it cannot save, it cannot always even last.
This is actually longstanding. When I think about the stories that always bothered me as a child - that Winnie-the-Pooh with the bird, Snoopy Come Home, Milo and Otis (shut up) - really, they're about that failure of love. Not that the love fails or falters, but that it simply isn't enough. Similarly for the ones that really get to me now, God of Small Things, Beloved, Fugitive Pieces, Hallucinating Foucault, etc.
Of course, so often it isn't enough. In my line of work, we always say to focus on the good ones, to not let yourself get caught in the ones where you weren't enough, for whatever reason. But it's always those that haunt you.
I suppose it's bleak to say that we are profoundly inadequate, especially with regard to love, but I am sort of a bleak person.
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