Comments by "John Warner" (@johncrwarner) on "Don't Worry about Reading More Books. Focus on Reading Better." video.

  1. Retiring helped me and having to do caring for my handicapped partner I have a lot of dead time so I fill it with books. Not being in what I call the "American mindset" I am a European I am glad I have not had the culture that I must read more and faster to claim the prize of having read so much. My reading is varied and I definitely avoid the BookTubers who read a load of books for quantitative reasons. I hit sixty this year and so I decided to do a project of reading books / texts published in, awarded a prize or translated into English in 1962. My #1962project started in hospital this year and have been collecting and reading some interesting stuff. My favourite in terms of memorability and impact was Eugène Ionesco's "Le roi se meurt" (known in English as "Exit the King") My mother is 92 years old and slowly dying and this work is about dying is funny and philosophical and had strong observational tendencies too. I read it in French and have also purchased Ionesco's "Notes et contre-notes" some of his theoretical writing also published in 1962.
    1
  2. In the summer of 2021 I read "The Lehman Trilogy" in Italian It is over eight hundred pages long and it took me six weeks to complete. It was a wonderful experience as my Italian was very rusty But the novel was written in verso libero (free verse) so there was repetition and short sentences which helped. It was my first verse novel - as an adult and was a fascinating experience.
    1
  3.  @jshaers96  And the longest I have spent on a single book as well.
    1