fail

I talked about summer goals. I made reading the book Catch 22 one of them. I failed. It was due back to the library on June 21 and I decided I would give myself until that date to determine if I would finish it or not, and I determined that I would not. So back it went.

Over 400 pages

I talked to my mom, who I consider to be a model reader, and she said she no longer forces herself to finish books. It's not worth it. She wants only to read for pleasure nowadays.

And I was forcing it. I found myself spacing out and going back to reread parts, and spacing out again. I think I have an attention problem. I know it's probably like running, you have to train. Just because I admire people who run marathons doesn't mean I can just go out and do it without training. And this is seriously kind of a marathon book.

I wanted to read it because I accidentally found out one day that it was considered one of the most significant novels of the twentieth century. And the phrase "catch 22", referring to no-win situations, made it's way into the English language from this book. I was interested in knowing more, and I do know more now. Because I cheated, of course. I found notes summarizing every chapter of the book online and I read those. Much faster way of learning. It's actually what I used to do in high school and college if I needed to read a big book.

Wanting not to cheat this time though, I tried learning a bit about speed reading. I know that I am too detail oriented and I fixate while reading. I have actually turned back a few pages to reread details of what a character was wearing at times. I need a good visual of what is going on for the story to work in my head. The speed reading methods I looked at all said not to concern yourself with comprehension at all. And I tried the methods and I comprehended nothing when I did.

I tried to pick and choose what parts I was going to read. Skimmed over parts, trying to pick out what is probably important. I read someone's review of the book, who said chapter 18, The soldier who saw everything twice, was an important chapter. So I read it. Skipped a whole lot of other chapters.

If I were on Jeopardy today, and the book came up as a category, I might be able to get some of those. Which was what I was interested in in the first place. Because I read a whole bunch of reviews and analysis of the book. But don't let my knowledge of anything ever fool you. Chances are I didn't come by it honestly. I'm about half full of crap.

However, the quest to find books that I like to read is still on.