I hate doing things under time pressure, but I have to admit I do a
lot more things when time pressure exists. One of the things is writing.
Another is posting the things I write. They aren’t very good, but
they’re better than writing that doesn’t exist.
(in case you forgot, I’m still posting this pretty much only because
I made myself post once every
weekend)
It’s interesting that I can impose time pressure on myself by
declaring commitment devices by fiat and it works. Other people have
developed other methods of doing this — I recently discovered
The Most Dangerous
Writing App, which puts time pressure on you to type every five
seconds or it deletes everything you wrote. There are many other ways
it’s done.
“I like fantasy books! I used to read a lot of Eoin Colfer.”
“What does that mean, used to? You don’t read anymore?
That’s so sa-a-a-ad…”
Our teacher and I had this conversation during our first English
class, and I realized I agreed with her. Well, no, of course I still
read: news articles, r/AskReddit threads, and the books we get assigned
in class. But not fiction, almost. As I later mentioned to my teacher, I
followed Sam Hughes’ Ra avidly
(something I highly recommend). That was it.
What does my present self still think of Eoin Colfer? Although I
adored the Artemis Fowl books when I was younger, my interest
faded, but not before I had recommended it to my sister. The
conversation spurred me to get out the seventh Artemis Fowl book,
which I had stopped reading halfway through a year ago, and finish it.
It was still true that I didn’t like it as much, because I couldn’t feel
the high stakes strongly in the book and I found that the joking asides
compounded the problem. But a few days later, when we took a trip to the
Taipei library, I found the eighth book and borrowed it, plowing through
nine-tenths of the book before we left. The ending seemed to be happy
but still felt counterintuitively poignant for me. In any case, I had
closure.
So what’s the lesson? Authors vary in output too. I was naïve to
suppose that because I found this book boring, I had outgrown all books
that were even vaguely similar. In the same trip, I also borrowed a
bunch of other random fantasy books, plus a realistic fiction book about
a teenage pregnancy, just for kicks. It turned out to be surprisingly
good. In a week, I read four books, cover to cover, despite a typical
load of homework and chemo.
Any excuses I made before about not having enough time simply don’t
hold water. Still, I have yet to figure out if this sort of reading is
sustainable, because not every book is so engrossing. Far from it…