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I cut mine cross-wise to save space. There is a lot of authors who make no sense.
In all honesty, in no way sarcastically, I consider this a war crime.
“yeah, I just finished Infinite. It was pretty good, abrupt ending though. I hear Jest picks up right where it left off.”
Skip jail. Straight to a firing squad of librarians.
Author here, I don’t give a fuck, as long as the book was bought/is read. Stop fetishizing books or start fucking them.
I do wonder why this person wouldn’t just use a e-ink reader, though.
I feel like there is a lack of understanding how or what about e-ink. My partner only grasped the concept that it’s not an emmisive display after the 5th time explaining. And some friends still don’t seem to understand the difference between an e-reader and tablet. (they are extremely tech-illiterate)
If I extrapolate this, there have to be a lot of people who don’t want an e-reader because ‘they don’t want to look at a screen’.
Well, let them read on paper, then.
just popping in to say that, as somebody who is very affected by looking at a screen before going to sleep, my Kindle is one of the best value items that I’ve ever had.
My kids both prefer paper books to e-readers.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don’t care about your children but good for them, I guess. It’s never about the medium, it’s about the content, so if you like to read on screens, paper, cut books or toilet paper, it doesn’t matter. Only the content matters. Audiobooks are okay too.
New research suggests it is slightly about the medium (for the kids, idk about adults it wasn’t discussed). Physical books are better for attention span, apparently because they have “friction”, i.e., you have to turn the page yourself so you “work” for the information, which makes information “valuable” so you hold onto it.
I guess we can have crank-powered e-readers where you have to work to turn the page?
Your brain works differently listening to audiobooks than reading. So it’s not necessarily a substitute, in that you may not get the same out of the text.
Having said that, my wife is a bit ADHD and struggles to read books, but is addicted to audiobooks. 😅
Man, people like you are why others hate reading. You hurt my business by thinking that the medium choice grants you some form of moral/intellectual superiority, and you hurt other’s enjoyment by boasting about it. Stop looking at the finger and start looking at the moon.
People, read books on the medium that you are more confortable with, be it screen or paper. Treat your books however the fuck you want. Listen to books if you don’t have the time/focus to read. Be a sleazy fuck and watch the movie/series about the book if you’re not really into it. What? There’s a video game about it? Play it.
It’s never about the cup, it’s about the wine inside it. Confront yourselves to new ideas and stories, because that’s what it is all about, not “carving mental holes in your books to put your mental wee-wee inside, because paper is sacred”.
Wanna imagine things with your brain but can’t be bothered to read boring stuff? Play tabletop roleplaying games, it’s even more effective because you’re actively engaging in it.
Got aphantasia, you were born without the capacity to imagine what you read as you read it? Watch the movie.
Got dyslexia? Bored at the gym? Stuck in traffic?Audiobook.
Etc etc.
If you have one fucking thing to take away from this rant, it’s : it’s not about the cup, it’s about the wine. If you can’t get that, you’re not a reader, you’re a fetishist and you’re hurting the one thing you care about (and probably would read the most toxic shit and swallow it just because it’s printed on paper).
I have no idea who you are, aside from what you’ve stated in these comments, but you clearly have a great passion for the core concept of what stories are capable of.
Just wanted to make it known I respect that passion, and am uplifted by knowing it exists out there somewhere. Cheers for that. 💛
Just so you’re aware, your posts in this thread come across as very belligerent to me. I’m trying to ignore the tone that I perceive, and to clarify.
My understanding had been that the brain worked differently based on how it was getting text. I did a bit of DuckDuckGo and it turns out that further research shows that these differences are not that big:
As someone who would never, ever do this to one of my beloved collection: Go for it. Watever keeps you enjoying them. As others have said, we’re not talking hundred year old first edition hardcovers here. You can still tape them up and pass them on, unlike those philistines who take one on a hike and rip out the pages they’ve read to use for campfire tinder.
Release the hounds!
I know a woman that cut her textbooks in college to make them less heavy to carry. She is unique.
You should cut diagonally. If it makes a sandwich better, imagine what it can do for a novel.
Get the pitchforks!
The LitBros will hunt this man for sport because of what he did to Infinite Jest.
Feels like a quite awful thing to do 😅
Clearly this is someone who actually reads their books. Given that they are mass market paperbacks… I have no problem with this. If I were an author I would much rather someone does this to my work and actually reads it and enjoys it to someone keeping a pristine copy unopened on their shelf forever.
infinite jest is half footnotes, which are at the back of the book, which is part of the “joke” of the book, being based around extreme academia.
Yeah, sure. The inane pretentiousness was just a “joke”!
Fuck that book.
I mean I know nothing about this book besides what I’ve read about it in these two comments, but it is called infinite jest, why is it so hard to believe that it’s a joke?
It’s a reference to Shakespeare, when Hamlet finds the skull of the old court jester who looked after him as a child. “Alas! poor Yorrick! I knew him, Horatio. A man of infinite jest and most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times…”
In the book, it’s the name of a film made by the protagonist’s late Dad, one which combines a myriad of new and experimental film techniques and technical application of lenses with some incredibly beautiful people - and is so compelling that if you watch it you can’t stop watching it until you starve to death.
The book juxtaposes the obviously bad addiction of drugs and shows us the journey of an addict trying to gain a control of their life, with a bunch of “good” addictions amongst a group of adolescent boys trying to become tennis pros at an ivy-league-type college.
With a bunch of criticism of American life: Years no longer have numbers like 1997 or 2008, they are sponsored by brands so there’s Year of the Whopper, Year of Glad Flaccid Plastic Receptical Products, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment… Canada, Mexico and the USA have formed into one giant country after the mid-west became uninhabitable due to pollution…
honestly I love the book but you have to be a certain type of person to love it.
I can sense Booktokers rushing this way to tell you you broke one of the book rules
I don’t know, I’m a priest and I once sliced up a Bible for personal use.
Tthere was once a particular version of the Bible that I wanted, but the publisher only made a hard-backed version. I hate hard-back books (especially Bibles). So I bought it and immediately sliced the cover off and made a new one out of old church bulletins and duct tape.
The vast majority of books made in something like the last 50+ years are all very low quality and degrade rapidly anyway.
