How Fast do you Read?

This is sort of a post to address a question that’s come up frequently not only in the comments section and on social media, but also in my emails with authors.  It seems to be a question on the tip of everyone’s tongue for me: How fast do you read?  I guess it seems pretty crazy to most people that I review almost a book a day.  So first off, let me start with my life story.

I was a very reluctant reader, but that’s an entirely different story.  However, once I actually got reading I took to it like a fish in water.  My elementary school had an excellent reading program, but they liked to keep everyone in grade one and two on the same level.  The program lasted for grades one and two and they never, ever advanced any grade one past level 13 because there were 26 or 27 levels.  So even if I could proficiently read aloud from a book in a level the first day I got it, I would have to read almost all 20 books in the basket for the reading assistants to even consider moving me up.  (These were picture books, mind you.)

Still, I managed to reach the last level by April or May of grade two and that began my mother’s bitter fight with the school to get me some challenging books.  I believe that was one of the only fights she ever lost with the school because the reading assistants would not pass me until I read every single book in that level, which carried me on to the end of the year.  It was incredibly frustrating for an already frustrated and thoroughly bored eight year old.

I really started to shine in grade three, when the school librarian finally let me read whatever I wanted.  That was the year I read the Harry Potter series (well, as many books as were out at the time), the first Narnia book and so many others.  Since I, like many bookish people, didn’t really have many friends, books became my friends.

There’s not much to tell after that.  I’ve kept on reading whenever I have the time, despite working six days a week and trying to have a social life.  No, I’ve never taken any speed-reading courses or read books on speed-reading.  I just read really quickly, I guess.  For those of you that are wondering, I’ve broken down my average reading time below:

I average about 100-120 pages per hour, depending on the level of the book.  For something as involved as Colleen McCullough’s The First Man in Rome it’s more like 90 pages per hour, but something simple as Abandon by Meg Cabot it’s more like 130 pages per hour.  Middle grade novels can be as much as 200 pages per hour, but that speed is really stretching my reading comprehension skills.

The average young adult book I come across is 300-400 pages long, so at around 110 pages per hour, I can get through it in 3-4 hours.  For a book like The First Man in Rome (which is about 1100 pages) that means I can read it in 11 hours, or about a week of reading if I prioritize other books I can review more quickly.

Reading is my talent, just like some people are really talented athletes or musicians.  My question to you guys now is: how fast do you read?  Do you know?  Or how many books do you read in an average week/month/year?

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

(Cover picture courtesy of Kids Book Review.)

If you start to read this book, you will go on a journey with a nine-year-old boy named Bruno.  (Though this isn’t a book for nine-year-olds.)  And sooner or later you will arrive with Bruno at a fence.

Fences like this exist all over the world.

We hope you never have to encounter one.

I wanted to like this book.  I really, really did.  I mean, it’s practically a classic.  The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is studied in classrooms all over the world and it’s even been made into quite a popular movie.  It’s supposed to be a touching take on the Holocaust through the naive eyes of a nine-year-old boy.  This should be a book I loved.

Obviously it wasn’t if I’m rambling on like this.  Throughout the novel, the words ‘trying too hard’ came to mind because of John Boyne’s writing style.  He tries to portray an incredibly naive nine-year-old boy but ends up portraying a spoiled, unaware brat.  He tries to put an ironic, tragic twist at the end, but it feels contrived.  John Boyne just tried too hard instead of letting the story speak for itself.  His constant interjections and observations make it seem more like he’s telling the story than truly showing it through innocent Bruno’s eyes.  It makes it feel like he expects his readers are idiots who couldn’t infer some of the more subtle themes from the story itself.

I’ve read thousand page books that are less tedious than The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.  John Boyne repeats things over and over and over again until it feels like he’s beating you over the head with a stick.  Readers are not idiots; they will not forget that Bruno’s father was visited by the ‘Fury’ over only 215 pages.  They will also not forget that Bruno is a spoiled brat who matures very, very little by the end of the novel.  In the end, he’s still essentially the same ridiculously naive child who seems to lack even basic understanding of the world around him.  There’s also the issue of whether Bruno could have even gotten near the fence at Auschwitz without getting spotted by the numerous guards or getting zapped by the electrified fence.

In short, what was supposed to be a touching novel was not.  It was patronizing and tedious, just to use two words that come to mind.  The Boy in the Striped Pajamas should have been a tribute to those who lost their lives, but ended up feeling like John Boyne wanted a literary award badly.

I give this book 1/5 stars.

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The Eye of Erasmus by Teresa Geering

(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)

The Eye of Erasmus’ tells of Erasmus, a baby born during a thunder storm, who is clearly destined to be special and, initially, especially obnoxious with his flashing black eyes and haughty ways, until he finds love. The trouble is that the girl literally of his dreams hasn’t actually been born yet. No problem …… Oh, but there is ……. Danger lurks ……..

[Full disclosure: I received a free print copy of this book from Teresa Geering in exchange for an honest review.]

I had mixed feelings about The Eye of Erasmus, but not necessarily in a bad way.  My feelings were more of “That was good, but it could have been much better.”  I’ll explain.

The Eye of Erasmus was sort of told in an omniscient point of view, but unfortunately that means that we’re being told everything rather than shown it.  We’re told how Erasmus and Shasta feel and the narrator injects bits of information about the future not-so-subtly.  Still, for such a short book it worked out okay.  It certainly made for a fast-paced plot.  Yet at the same time, I feel if it had been told in a third person point of view between just Shasta and Erasmus with more showing and less telling, the book could have made the jump from ‘good’ to ‘amazing’.

Teresa Geering has a very pared down style of prose and that’s fine, but sometimes I feel like I really want more description.  What sort of time period did Erasmus come from?  What did it look and feel like?  I wanted to be transported to his time and feel his despair as he left it, but also his hope of finding the girl he was meant to be with.  A little more description would have made it easier to picture the setting as well as get the whole tone of the novel more quickly.  What received a lot of description and really got my attention was the supernatural elements, more specifically Erasmus’ powers.  His powers are fascinating and it would be great to see if in the sequel we learned exactly why and how he got them.

While I wouldn’t call The Eye of Erasmus amazing, I would call it good.  Because despite my criticisms, the characters were generally well developed, the plot was fast-paced and there were some pretty crazy plot twists that blindsided me.  Shasta and Erasmus kept my attention and the affection between them was real, if a little bit rushed.  Overall, it was a decent book but not a great one.

I give this book 4/5 stars.

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Abandon by Meg Cabot

(Cover picture courtesy of Manda’s Movements.)

Now Death wants her back

Pierce knows what it’s like to die, because she’s done it before.  Though she tried returning to the life she knew before the accident, Pierce can’t help but feel at once a part of this world, and apart from it.  yet she’s never alone…because someone is always watching her.

Now she’s moved to a new town, but even here, he finds her.  Pierce knows he’s no guardian angel, and his dark world isn’t exactly heaven, yet she can’t stay away…especially since he always appears when she least expects it, but exactly when she needs him most.

If she lets herself fall any further, Pierce may just find herself back in the one place she most fears: the Underworld.

The myth of Persephone…darkly reimagined.

Could there possibly be a more confusing way to tell what should be a straightforward story?  What happened to a linear narrative?  Or at least one that makes sense?

Meg Cabot is a great author, no doubt about that.  I loved her Airhead trilogy and Abandon is still well-written.  However, I had a very hard time figuring out what the heck was going on as Pierce described three different points in her past all at once.  We jump around from her grandpa’s death to the incident at her old school after her death to her first death and it’s just terribly confusing.  If you’re going to give your readers some backstory, at least give it in a logical order!  (And yes, I’m actually quite mad about this because this could have been a great story with a little logic added to how the backstory was presented.)

Okay, so once I actually figured out what was going on, I sort of did enjoy the story.  Pierce is a decent enough character and you can actually feel her emotional struggles as she tries to cope with life after coming back from the dead.  Her confused feelings about John, her loneliness, etc. were all very real and made her an interesting character.  Her altruistic side came through often, which makes her much more sympathetic than a lot of YA heroines.  John himself seems like kind of a jerk to me, but unlike some love interests there’s potential for him to change in the next book.  And he also has a legitimate reason for being a jerk, again unlike a lot of love interests.

If you can figure out the plot, it’s quite fast-paced and there are some pretty interesting twists.  There are parallels to the Persephone myth for those of you that like Greek mythology, but Abandon doesn’t stick strictly to it.  That way it’s close enough to add another dimension to the story without making it completely predictable.  And now that Pierce’s backstory has been established, I will be reading the next book, Underworld in the hope that without so much plot confusion it will be a decent book.  However, I will be borrowing the next book from the library, not buying it.  I’m still kind of wary.

I give this book 3/5 stars.

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An Apology to Self-Published Writers

Remember one of my first articles I ever did?  It was exactly one year ago to this day and it was called Self-Publishing: A Reviewer’s Perspective.  While I didn’t exactly say self-publishing was a terrible thing that was ruining literature, my feelings about it were generally negative.

So, first off, let me say I’m sorry.

I’m sorry for judging self-published writers before I really knew what self-publishing involved.  I’m sorry for judging self-published writers based on my very limited experience reading self-published books and a few big media incidents.  I’m sorry that I jumped to conclusions and pretty much lumped all self-published authors together.

You’ll probably be wondering how I came to my new perspective on self-publishing.  Let me say it wasn’t easy and it’s certainly not easy to admit on your public blog that you screwed up.  But it’s the right thing to do.  So here’s sort of how I changed my mind:

1.  I read some amazing self-published books.

Before I wrote my piece I had very few good experiences with self-publishing in general.  From reading books with tons of mistakes to watching self-published authors explode at reviewers who gave them bad reviews, you could say I had only seen the ugly side of self-publishing.  That’s why I didn’t exactly support, but didn’t exactly dismiss the possibility of self-publishing having a good side.  I just didn’t have the experience necessary to see the good side.

In the past year I’ve started reading a lot more self-published books and I found some great ones.  Prophecy of the Most Beautiful by Diantha Jones, There Comes a Prophet by David Litwack and Starlet’s Web by Carla J. Hanna, just to name a few.  Part of what helped me come to this stage of acceptance was reading awesome, well proofread and well-written books like these.  The other part is that I realized no publisher would have even considered publishing these.  Some of them are too unique and have unconventional stories, others are books that don’t conveniently fit into one category and thus could never be marketed easily.

And you know what?  It would have been a terrible shame not to read any of these simply because I lumped all self-published authors together.

2.  I actually spoke to a wide variety of self-published authors.

In a psychology class I took I learned that one of the most effective ways to end prejudice towards certain groups is to expose the prejudiced person to that group more frequently.  It’s hard to hate something if you put a face to it.  That’s why it was so easy for me to completely dismiss self-publishing as an absolute last resort: I didn’t really know that many self-published authors.

But then I started interviewing self-published authors and saw the reasons why they self-published.  Some of them submitted their books to every publisher in the entire country and others just wanted to have control over the entire process.  As a blogger, I can completely understand that.  Here on The Mad Reviewer, while I generally stick to my book mandate I do occasionally stray from it if I feel like it.  I might do a post about my vacation or on my birthday every year I’ll rant about something I feel passionate about but isn’t book-related.  I love being in control; I completely understand how authors might want to control what their book cover looks like because some traditionally published authors get horrible book covers.  It’s just little things like that that it’s nice to have control over.

Talking to self-published authors and hearing that some of them had been trying to get published for 10 years before they decided to self-publish really changed my viewpoint.  I mean, most of these authors were great writers who should have been published in the mainstream.  I’d read their books and loved them, but publishers either didn’t see the value in them or didn’t see a market for them (not that the two are mutually exclusive).

3.  I learned more about the self-publishing community.

I’ve had some really bad experiences with self-published writers, but 99% of my experiences have been good.  Obviously not all self-published writers are crazy people that will attack you online if you give them a bad review.

What I didn’t realize for a while is that the self-publishing community really, really hates when one of their own presents a bad image to the media by acting out.  One entitled writer attacking a reviewer reflects badly on the whole self-publishing community.  I applied that to my own life: what if one person in Saskatchewan was an alcoholic and suddenly everyone in Saskatchewan was perceived as being alcoholics?  That’s not even a very good comparison because there are far more self-published authors than there are people in Saskatchewan.

As a reading public, we need to stop judging self-published authors by the loose cannons.  One person going crazy shouldn’t ruin it for a generally well-behaved and supportive community.  That took a long time for me to realize, but I’m definitely glad I did.  It’s absolutely not right to judge a whole group by a few people.

In general, I’d say that the reading public is starting (very subtly) to shift toward something like acceptance toward self-publishing.  Will it ever be on the same level as traditional publishing?  That’s hard to say.  There will always be the lemons in the community that ruin it for everyone else, but I think self-publishing is getting better.  By ‘better’, I mean that there are way more resources out there for self-published writers and far more ways for them to get the word out.

We’ll know self-published books are mostly accepted when self-published authors are able to submit their books into big name awards like the Nebula, Newberry or Booker Prize.  Will the mainstream accept self-publishing?  In time, perhaps.  For now, although I’m a relatively small-scale reviewer, everyone out there in the self-publishing community should know that you have one convert.  Maybe in the future there will be more.