On Reading

I am the kind of reader where unless the book I’m reading is one I’m studying, my brain is like a sieve. I may not be a mood reader in practice, but in my memory I am, because all I remember are vibes. Did I like that love interest with the hair? Did that one that joined the thre*some that once actually end up being the baddie?

Honestly, my memory for reading is a lot like my memory for directions. It’s much more the feel of it – oh, wait, maybe I’ve walked too far, this doesn’t look familiar…?, or fck, I’ve not turned where I should’ve, type deal rather than anything particularly specific, unless I either loved or hated it.

And I don’t think this is a bad thing, honestly, it just makes doing reviews on here difficult because if I literally am not writing a review immediately after I finish reading, I’ll forget the details.

This may be a bit of a protection from my brain, honestly. I fairly easily read 100 pages an hour, even when it’s not my trash-tv version of reading (think Zodiac Academy or Emily Henry or Emma Hart). If I were to try and retain the content of the books I’ve read over the course of my lifetime, there would be no room for anything else.

I studied English lit in school, so I had to read the classics essentially one a week in my last years of uni, and I didn’t find that brutal. I’ve always read at a pretty bruising pace, and the fact that I can’t remember character names or much other than major plot points for a book I’ve read a month ago now, doesn’t change the fact that I had all the understanding in the world of the nuance and the plot and the foreshadowing as I read it; I just happen to not retain it for long.

Reading is and always has been an escape for me. What about you? Are you someone that remembers everything in a book (or even most things in a book) if it’s not something you’re actively annotating or analysing?