SciFi and Fantasy Book Club discussion

Hopefully it is ok to post a random long post here in the Member's Chat forum. My adult daughters gave me a nice paperback version of The Hobbit for Father's day (a holiday in the United States today). I've read The Hobbit many times and like it, though I like the Lord of the Rings better. But it is one thing that makes me wonder about how quickly I am reading books.

A second thing that made me question my pace of reading books is our library's summer reading program. It is really to encourage children to read more but we usually do it as adults anyway. But the point is that the reading challenge is based on minutes of reading and not pages or books read. So, I don't have to rush through a book to meet the 1000 minute goal for the summer (a very easy goal intentially for children).

My third point is how great a resource this group has been for me because it has so many people who have read many more SFF books than I have.

Fourth point is that I just finished my 2025 goal of reading 20 books which is how many I read last year. I could probably read 40+ books this year at the current rate unless they are really big books.

But, should I? I'm really not retaining the books I am reading, but I am getting exposed to a wide variety of authors and books compared to my past experience. I guess my other point is that I'm slowly reading some Keats poetry. I'm thinking of setting aside my goal of reading more Hugo Award winners and just settling down and reading The Hobbit again. What do you think? It's great to be exposed to a bunch of different books but maybe it's cool to just marinate in some good writing? Nice big print with fun illustrations.

That's my rant/data dump. Happy Father's Day to those who it applies to or to anyone else too.

Bobby

I read around 200 books a year. The good ones I retain, the mediocre to poor ones I don't. As I purchase a lot of book bundles from third party sources: Humble Bundle and StoryBundle mostly, there is some dross in the bundles. But some turn out to be gems that I'd never have read otherwise.

In my humble opinion there are lots of good ways to enjoy reading. I’m always looking to experience new and different authors and stories and styles, but I also love to revisit old favourites or consensus classics I may not have appreciated before, or that might look different to me now than they did a few years ago.

Hope everyone had a great Father's Day!

I'm currently also working through my goal of reading more top Sci-Fi books. Not necessarily Hugo winners. Just the books that consistently get rated near the top in lists of great works of science fiction. Having said that I feel myself getting sci-fi'ed out and may switch to Fantasy soon.

Before that I went through a similar exercise of reading great works of Literature, when I read novels like Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Ernest Hemingways The Old Man and the Sea. I found them boring.

Reading is about as personal an activity as you can get, so there's no right way or wrong way to do it. I think it's fine to re-read The Hobbit if that's what you want to do. Last year I re-read LOTR for about the 4th or 5th time and loved it as much as ever. Speaking of Keats, maybe you should read Hyperion by Dan Simmons. Simmons loves Keats and he references him all the time in the book. My current read is Fall of Hyperion which is even more Keat'ish than the first book.

I am a strong believer in reading for enjoyment. I also think there is great value in intentionally diversifying your reading experiences because it will also expand your worldview and make you a better human. So focus on quality not quantity. Do some slow, deep thought reading AND pick up a few new-to-you books and authors.

And then update us at the end of the year with your book total.

Book goals are a great way to get motivated to keep reading and solidify a reading habit, but I often see goals overtake outcomes. This happened to me with language learning. I was excited about keeping a Duolingo streak for three hundred days, but I could barely understand the language. I quickly realized I was more interested in the streak numbers than language learning.

So I prefer to move slow these days and focus on my results. Also, if a book doesn't grip me by fifty or so pages, I move on. But if you do enjoy tracking your goals and can absorb the material, then you've reached book nirvana. That's the best of both worlds.

Cheers!

Thanks for the interesting thread, Bobby.

I had to tweak my way of thinking about reading goals this year away from the total number of titles to the average page count per title, I find it is helping me spend more time immersed in individual worlds and stories as opposed to flitting from one to another on short order. In years past I was very happy, even proud, to 'read' 400+ books but halfway through this one I'm at 108 and probably the happier for it.

Bottom line? If ambitious goals make you feel you are not actually enjoying your pleasure reading it is perfectly legit to revisit them, modify them, or look for other ways to motivate oneself. Nothing new there, but it certainly applied in my case.

Congratulations on reaching your reading goal, Bobby!

I totally relate to the issue of retaining the reading material. Still occasionally stress about it but nowhere near as much as I did before. I’d like to think that I’ve found a nice balance, a place where I can forgive memory slippage in favour of greater exposure. The way I counter my stress is by keeping notes, highlights, and brief summaries. I’m not particularly good with words, so I don’t write that many reviews but, where inspiration strikes, I do occasionally enjoy noting my personal experiences with books.

Some books are easy to remember, they hijack your mind and live there rent free, and some I forget/expunge from my mind the moment I turn the last page. What I find though, is that the more I read the more fun I have in trying to connect to some of those past reading experiences. A word here, an allusion there, a certain kind of atmosphere or reference can conjure up memories of similar subjects, themes, and experiences in a flash (even if I have to trawl through my notes in order to pin point the exact source of the memory).

I guess what I’m trying to say is read as little or as much as your heart desires. Things that matter will stick and those that escape your memory can always be looked up. It’s like everything else in life, you don’t have to have photographic/documentary evidence that you’ve met this person or the other, been somewhere or done something, sometimes it’s the experience alone that matters, no matter how fleeting, for all those little things transform us in one way or another. So, whether you retain all of the information from the book or not, the change that the book affects in you will still be there, and, to me at least, it’s a comfort.

Thanks everyone. It's always great to get input from all of you with your various experiences. Man, life is short and there is never enough time to do everything. I've had some fun experiences reading a bunch of SFF. Whatever number of books I end up with this year I'm sure it will be good. Happy reading!