What's One Thing You Learned About Yourself From Reading This Year? (12/5/21)

[Marc]

Tell us one thing you learned about yourself from reading this year. It can be something you learned about yourself as a reader or just personally from reading.

[Lark]

I learned to be grateful I'm a native English speaker because this year was the first time that I really, really got it, how lucky we English speakers are to have the largest (even if it's still a tiny %) selection of worldwide multi-language literature made available to us through translation.

The books that matter most to me this year (and the last dozen years) were originally written in Russian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Hebrew, French, Dutch, Indonesian...

I began to think, then, of how these writers of my favorite books probably don't have the same access to one another's work, as I do to all of their works. They need to meet in the intermediary language of English or wait for a Hungarian book to be translated into Korean etc. which of course may never happen.

[Marc]

Sort of random, but I learned I have a lot more trouble writing reviews of books I've read in electronic form than books I've read in paper form even though it's much easier/quicker to capture passages and take notes with ebooks (or search for words/passages). I think it has to do with memory as the manual process of underlining, writing in the margins, or flipping back through pages tends to cement things in my mind more securely.

I still have trouble finding the right balance between planned reading and allowing for spontaneity.

[Xan]

Yeah, I know what you mean. The act of writing something down is enough for me to remember it. I usually don't have to look at it again. Write it down and I remember it, which is a good thing, because I'd never remember which notebook I wrote it in.

[Marc]

It's a fascinating process, Xan.