November Group Read: Check-in the First!

[glinda]

The first week of the challenge has reached it’s conclusion. Time to share with the class your triumphs and tribulations. Finish a book? Make a start on something that you've been meaning to get round to for ages? Or finally accept that that one book everyone recommended you is just not your thing and you're never going to get past the second chapter? Dedicated way too much time to reading today just so you don’t have to admit you only read two chapters this week? (Or is that just me?!)

Successes and failures in the comments below!

Comments

[starandrea]

I love your strategy of reading a lot today so as to have more than two chapters to check in with (even though two chapters is GREAT)! Because at the end of the day, motivation is motivation! ♥

For myself, across both paper books and audio books, I've learned something important this week: sometimes fiction is easier to follow than non-fiction. This isn't true for me across the board, but this week I encountered it twice and changed what I was doing because of it.

First a success: I did finish a Chinese graded reader, yay! It was fiction, pretty straightforward, and I'd been meaning to start on these graded biographies I've had for a while, so I went to one of those next. That was a failure, because the biography was so hard I thought it was a much higher level than the fiction story I'd just read. But no, it was actually supposed to be easier than what I'd just finished!

I concluded that in a fiction story I have expectations about what's going to happen next (in conversation, in someone's daily routine, maybe even in the way a story is told) that make it easier to understand words in context, whereas in a biography there's no way to guess what's coming next (unless you already know the life story of the person you're reading about, which may have been my disadvantage). It was the difference between reading fictional dialogue: "what are you doing here" "oh I'm getting the mail, did you hear the news" "no what news" etc., which is pretty predictable, and a biographical account: "he didn't graduate from high school, so he started looking for jobs to do while pursuing his musical career," which is completely unpredictable (to me). (And also I'm not going to lie, this biography was a little boring in addition to being very hard to follow.)

So I put the biographies away and went to thriftbooks.com and found some more graded fiction. I'm reading a "harder" one now (two chapters so far, cheers :D ) and it's still way easier than the "easy" biography. (It's also more interesting!)

Second, I found a similar phenomenon when I idly switched from audiobooks to audio dramas: the audiobooks were fiction, and there was dialogue, so that was good, but the audio dramas had people acting out the dialogue, and that made comprehension so much easier! I was so surprised by the difference that I renewed my efforts to find audio dramas I actually want to listen to, instead of just whatever was around when my Audible credits were about to expire :)

[glinda]

That is excellent progress, and far better to figure out what your brain wants to read than to keep plowing away at something that really isn't working for you at the moment when you might enjoy it more at another time, just because you put it on your list at the start of the month!

I was trying to finish a non-fiction I was already half-way through to give myself an early success to motivate myself for the challenge. However, I've been writing lots and watched a lot of films so I read even less than expected. I managed three chapters in the end yesterday, taking me to five chapters for the week which isn't terrible!

[starandrea]

However, I've been writing lots and watched a lot of films so I read even less than expected. I managed three chapters in the end yesterday, taking me to five chapters for the week which isn't terrible!

Nice! I'm impressed that you more than double your weekly output in a day! :D

Also it's neat that you know exactly what took the place of the reading time, and that the activities of writing and watching films seem to have so much in common with reading in terms of world building, expanding horizons, seeing different perspectives, etc. Sounds like a win overall! ♥

[peaceful_sands]

Well done with your accomplishments- it’s important to enjoy your reading rather than being discouraged. With audiobooks I find the narrator makes a huge difference to both my enjoyment and my ability to even follow the story.