Online Journal of Author Jeffrey Dean Palmatier - Bleak House: on page 582 of 880 pages.

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August 28th, 2008

08:09 pm

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Bleak House: on page 582 of 880 pages.
Finished Chapters 40 and 41. 298 pages to go.

I've definitely read this particular novel a lot quicker since I've tended to read two chapters a day rather than just one. I've come to realize that you can probably read a book too fast or too slow. If you read too slowly, you can become bored and forget important character and plot details. (I did this when I tried reading The Lord of the Rings, which has a pretty slow pace in terms of how slowly the narrative unfolds, if I remember correctly.) If you read too fast, you can't even comprehend what you just read because you fall into the trap to covering a certain amount of pages a day without realizing, "Hey, dumbass. You might have gotten through all these pages today, but do you remember any of it?" With Bleak House, I've been able to read it slow enough that I was able to actually comprehend it, but fast enough that I was able to keep all the byzantine plot details and the list of characters fresh in my mind. If you read a long Dickens novel too slow, by the time you encounter a minor character again, you can have a difficult time remember exactly who they were.

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