sorry to be a hater but I’m gonna be a hater. if you don’t know what it’s like to live without curiousity or awe you are either a child or an extremely fortunate person. to fight against incuriousity and a dulling of the senses is a full-time job unless you are extremely lucky with how much free time you have, the people around you, the events in your life you experience, etc. this is extremely haughty. “tell me what it’s like” it fucking sucks! annoying
What do you use for TTS? I’m interested in both a service that’ll turn a PDF into an audiobook and that reads a document line-by-line. I use Librera for the latter but the FOSS voices available on F-Droid leave a lot to be desired.
How integrated are you into the local community? How well do you speak the local language? I’m a foreigner living abroad and I would never trust either my own perception of this place nor 99% of other foreigners’ perceptions.
One thing I do not need is more recommendations of what to read, my list is bottomless. Do you find it encourages you to read more or read differently? Has it given you any insights about your habits?
what benefits do people see from tracking their reading? why do you do it? I couldn’t see the appeal years ago & had some hangups about it (like an overjustification effect psychologically from the social aspect of it messing up my motivation to read) but I’ve since gone through periods of tracking my spending & my food & seen benefits from those.
I realise now what I was getting at in the OP is how people massage themselves into a state of inspiration where they can maximise their engagement and what they get out of the book and the beauty of it and open their hearts to it or whatever, and how they interact with the text when they’re in that state. I realised this because I had the unusual honour of experiencing a state of inspiration the other night. Life feels pretty much dull and my heart feels pretty much shut to suggestion most of the time. What actually got me there was a completely unrelated life event (whose enchantment has already long since dried out). Seems like a work of art is the seed but the soil is life itself–how you read might be, at best, the water, so my question maybe isn’t of much use if we live in a world of concrete. I hope there’s more we can do that’s under our own control but it doesn’t seem that way now to me. (edited to rephrase a few times)
Nobody has to take it seriously but I suspect it’s more fun if they do. Some writers plot and foreshadow as baroquely as if they were building up a philosophical argument. I just read a review of a novel I’d read and the reviewer quoted some beautiful sentences I have no memory of.