The higher quality a piece of fiction, the longer it takes for me to read it.
I can have two books, identical in length, but if one is written in very straight-forward English, and in a very straight-forward story telling way, and the other is good literature, then the literature can take me at least twice as long to read it.
The two things that will slow me down are dense, poetical, beautiful prose, and deep or sophisticated, or perhaps technical concepts. Sometimes I have to pause to consider something philosophically, morally, or personally.
The whole movie thing was not something I set out to learn to do. It just developed in childhood, probably because I was spending a freakily large amount of my time reading, and having as little to do with other humans as possible. (I had discovered around the age of 7 or 8 that the school library was a refuge from the school bullies, and hence discovered that books were also a great refuge from my trigger-tempered sister and mother at home.)
It certainly doesn't come with every book. Or every time I read the same book. It's probably occurs more often if I'm very comfortable, and undisturbed for a long amount of time.
It was my first good lesson in how the human brain takes short-cuts, although I didn't appreciate that at the time. I was just completely wierded out and flabergasted, the first time I really noticed what I was doing, that my whole visual field had been taken up with imaginary, constructed stuff for the last half hour, and I hadn't been seeing the book, the page, the words, the loungeroom where I was... and yet I HAD to have been reading the words, because they were the origin of the visuals I was seeing.
Edited, Jul 31st 2008 5:34am by Aripyanfar
