Friday Reader Rambles

            Happy Friday y’all! In this edition of Friday Reader Rambles on the Kelswitch, I want to talk about something that some readers take pride in, and others would gladly take to their graves. I am talking about how fast we read.

            All the book lover pages on Facebook constantly post memes about flying through a thick book in one day or less. They read multiple books a week, maybe even a day. That’s cool, and I know people who can read like that, but I’ve never been one of them, especially not since I went to college. That ruins personal reading anyway.

            That’s not to say I don’t read fast, because I do. But I have never really been the type to sit for hours at a time and read. There’s not much that I sit for hours at a time and do, besides writing. On good days.

            I became a big reader in third grade, gorging myself on every Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen book I could get my hands on. As the years went on, I became the kid who chose a purse at the store solely based on whether or not it could hold my book. D.E.A.R, Drop Everything And Read in middle school was heaven. If we weren’t doing something else, I was reading anyway. I read at lunch. On the bus. When I finished my work early in class. These little fifteen to twenty minute intervals shaped me as a reader, because that’s pretty much how I read now.

            Even if I’m at home, I read a little here, a little there. If a page is taking a while to load on the Internet, or my computer is just being slow in general, I’ll open up my book so I can ignore the wait. When I get to a good stopping place, I set the book aside and go back to what I was doing. Sometimes I’ll pick the book up for no reason at all and just read for a few minutes, then stop and go back to whatever I was doing before.

            There have been exceptions to this rule. Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dark-Hunters demanded to be read within a night when I first got into them. I read Vane’s book in one night, and Zarek’s too. Acheron took a little longer, but that book was just huge. Bear and I each had our own copies and were doing progress updates on each other throughout the night. I think we got through at least seven hundred pages before we called it a night. I read The Dark Highlander by Karen Marie Moning in one night. And then we have A Song of Ice and Fire, where each book seems to take a month or more to get through.

            This is why my to be read pile never goes down. I read at my own pace, but buy at a much faster one. Plus, a lot of what I have now has been in the TBR pile since college, where it was a no brainer what was taking so long.

            How fast do you read? How many books do you read in a week?  A year? Do tell.