2 Hours, 36 Minutes, 41 Seconds
I read a book today.
It took me 2 hours, 36 minutes, and 41 seconds. I know because before I started reading it, I went on YouTube and searched dark academia and I picked a random 3-hour-ish video, put on my earphones and pressed play.
I didn't read it in a single stretch. I had to get up a few times. I took a break for lunch.
The book was Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, and by some random coincidence, the majority of the video was a piece called Dark Matter by Valter Nowak.
The book was 398 pages, and two pages of acknowledgements that I skimmed. Airport paperback, medium size font, simple language.
The concept wasn't new to me, and it wasn't a 5-star for me, but it was an easy read. I had heard of it, I knew it was sci-fi, I didn't remember the premise, but there was a physical copy and I wanted to read a story today, so I picked it up.
I used to read a hundred pages in an hour, so it's nice to see the speed remains the same (better?) even though it's been a long time that I sat down with a novel.
There's a part in the book where the protagonist talks about distilling a complex problem into the simplest possible question that can be answered. I've been reading some dense books for a long time and the fiction I was reading was e-books and also feeling like perhaps my attention span had reduced with all my online activity, which isn't social media, but it's still a lot of time on the internet. It turns out, all I needed was go back to the simplest form of reading for me. A book I can hold, a premise that's intriguing, and a willingness to sit somewhere for the length of a feature film.
Despite the title of this post, I didn't write this to brag about my reading speed. I know there are people who can read faster. The time is more significant to me because that's the time it took to prove to myself that I can immerse myself in a book again. I haven't lost the ability to do that. It wasn't even difficult.
All I had to do was be willing to try again, and read just the way I used to. I'm writing again too, the way I used to, often, a lot, indulgently.
It's like my reader/writer self is back. Not that I went anywhere.