I am not allowed to be called a book-worm, because despite my love and respect for literature - I have read less than 60 books in my entire life, since I am a slow reader.
For a long time I felt embarrassed of the fact, and people thought this meant I was generally slow and stupid.
In fact, I have a reason not to try and speed up my reading. It's because of my love and respect for books. An author may spend years writing his masterpiece, and a reader will spend a boring evening reading it briefly?!
One of my favorite books is the Perfume, and I loved it so much, I read it very fast - in 26 days. I enjoyed running home from school (I was in high-school then) to return to my favorite character - a genius, understood by no one, and surrounded by selfish idiots who cared only about money and statuses... Later I realized, I was the only one who loved Jean-Baptiste - he was a hated main character by most people (I wonder if their opinions would turn after Game of Thrones :D ). I really love those misunderstood geniuses, who have no human compassion but only their great goal. That's why I sometimes love the villains more than the main characters, who are lame and boring with their "goodness".
I was disappointed when I found out no friends of mine have read the book or at least saw the movie! Then my husband's aunt said "I read it and loved it!" I wanted to ask her - what did she think about a certain chapter, and she replied "I don't remember much - I read it once when I had insomnia - it was the Perfume and the another book - to spend the night". See? How can such a masterpiece be shared with another book and read for just spending a sleepless night?! This is bloody blasphemy, I say!
So I love spending months in the world of the book I'm reading, and not knowing how the story will resolve, having time to understand, fall in love, get angry, forgive and contemplate over every character and every situation. And because of this careful reading I have the ability to form personal opinions and theories about each book, and memorize every little detail so that I can basically close my eyes and reread the book years later.
The only time when I regretted being a slow and attentive reader was when it took me 1.5 years to read 3.5 books of Twilight saga and only in the middle of the last book I realized it was such a long load of.. ughm... stupidity that I just left it unfinished. I truly regret memorizing
that.
But still, the language of Twilight is amazing, and I learned many new words, and also heard about several classics I never heard of: Wuthering heights, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice (heard about the last one, but after such a good advertising decided to finally read it). Have you noticed, each Twilight book is sort of a remake of these books? It might be an interesting idea if it didn't look more like lack of fantasy and originality (remembering that the story is about vampires and werewolves which is sooo original). Here's a funny stereotypes crash: I read this book because my
boyfriend made me read it.
My favorite place to look for a new book to read is Penguin Classics series, though classics is not the only "genre" I love.
