As an author who normally writes a lot of thrillers with dark subjects, I found at the outset of last year that I just couldn't add any more darkness to the world. Lisica is a story I've been incubating for over 20 years, about a fictional island 1600 km off the coast of Oregon in the middle of the Pacific. I've just finished the series and it needs a new set of eyes to take it to the next level.

It is pure escapism, a love story about eleven researchers who are sent to Lisica for eight weeks to categorize the island's life before a new global satellite agreement comes into force and the USAF has to reveal the island to the wider world. The novels are equal parts scientific discovery, (with special emphases on data science, field biology, geology, meteorology, marine science, archaeology, and linguistics) and equal parts torrid romance between all these beautiful people. In many ways it is a utopian story, about people in paradise doing valuable work who can also love without hurting others. There is no toxic masculinity or bullying on this island, no sophomoric communication problems, no jealousy nor regret. It is my belief that natural challenges such as storms and cliffs and the mystery of the unknown is enough. This isn't Lost. There is magical realism here but it is more realism than magic.

I'm hoping to find a few qualified beta readers who have a background in these sciences, to help me make sure I present them correctly. But it's a lot to ask, for sure. Each of the four volumes is 15 chapters of exactly 26 pages each. 1560 pages in all. 425,000 words. If anyone knows a retired biology teacher with plenty of time on their hands, that's basically who I need at this stage.

My next step is to turn each chapter into audio episodes. As well as an author, I'm an Audible narrator and professional character actor. It is why each chapter is exactly 26 pages long. They make for sixty 42 minute audio episodes. I will eventually release the series week by week for free on my literary podcast over the next year.

Hopefully, this scratches someone's itch. Thanks for reading!

I have been a reader in my teens and my early youth. This all changed when I started to develop a depression back in the days. I had no will, interest or strength to pick up a book. During my university years I read a lot of textbooks but no prose. Picking up a book today feels like a chore for me. I find a lot of them bland and have to force myself to read/finish the story. So basically, my text boils down to: What helped you to rekindle your love for books/reading again? I am curious about all the answers.

EDIT:
Thanks to the comments so far, I have seen that I did not answer the important question why I stopped reading and why it now feels like a chore. So I'll try and give a bit more answers.
Besides "having no strength" during my phase of depression, I kind of started to hate the worlds the books offered. I wished to be part of these worlds, where my depression would not mess with me, where I could be happy or at least experience cool adventures. But after every reading session came the hard realization that I was still in this world with my depression and all my problems. That was when I decided to stop reading.

As to why reading feels like a chore today: I don't know. I started to read books again that I loved as a teenager/ young adult, but the magic was gone. Meanwhile, I also started to pick up more books from up-to-date bestseller lists, but I found a lot of them pretty boring, or I did not like the style of the author.

What's your general philosophy around this? In theory, we learn all our fundamental vocabulary from context. But at the same time, it may be important to know the precise meaning. When do you look it up? When do you make an educated guess and keep going?

Virtually none of my friends read books. I don't think my neighbors do, either. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only book reader. There's no one to talk to about the books I'm reading. I can post on the Internet and I will get a few upvotes here and there, sometimes a comment, but there's no depth to it. Also, I'd like to talk about books in person, not keyboard. The statistics of readership as conducted by our national library (Poland) were always piss poor, while I think they don't cover the whole society (because they focus on books lent from libraries?) it still seems accurate. Our nearest southern neighbors (Czechia) have high readership, same as our western neighbors (Germany, gosh I envy the sheer amount of books published in German). Poles not only don't read, but because of that we get only a small chunk of published books, oftentimes I search for a book online and there are English, German, Spanish, Russian, Czech (not as often, but a lot more than Polish) translations available, but not Polish -- I understand it, it's not worth it business-wise to publish some obscure books in Poland. It's a sad affair.

I've recently become interested in exploring history. However, though I am usually quick to read and process large amounts of information in other genres, I find myself struggling with the dates in history books. For example, here's a excerpt from the book I'm currently reading [1]:

During this period, tsarist policy was contradictory along its Western borders. In Finland, a Parliament was convened in 1863 for the first time in fifty-four years. In 1860, its own currency, the Finnish markka, was introduced, initially tied to the Russion rouble before being tied to the value of silver from 1865, which enabled the Duchy to trade more easily with the West. By 1906, Parliament had passed 400 separate pieces of legislation, and by 1883, Finnish had equal status as a language to Russian.

It takes me surprisingly long to process this; my mind struggles to put together the timeline and most relevant facts. This style is used throughout the whole book and others like it, where multiple dates (and names or facts) are mentioned in a short piece of text, often in seemingly random order. This makes it difficult for me to truly get something out the book -- either I don't remember the information well afterwards or I can't relax while reading because I'm constantly puzzling it together.

For people more familiar with historical works: are there any tricks to this? Does it perhaps get easier in time, when you become more familiar with the genre (similar to keeping track of the characters in fantasy books like Game of Thrones)? Or do some people have a natural affinity for dates, same as others have a mind for numbers or for languages? Looking forward to hearing your opinions and experiences.

[1] N. Taylor, "Estonia, A Modern History", 2nd edition, C. Hurst & Co, 2020.

Update: This was my first post here, and I’m loving the thoughtful replies. Here’s a summary of the tips so far:

• Combining specific dates into a higher level time periods, e.g. start/middle/late century.
• Using historical dates with a personal meaning as anchors to keep an overview of the time period.
• Paying special attention to the first line of each paragraph, the first section of each chapter, and the first chapter of each book, which should be a summary of the following paragraph, chapter, and book, respectively.
• Writing or drawing your own timeline of events, outside of the book.
• Adding context information to your own timeline, based on understanding why each event occurred in that time and that way.

I appreciate Goodreads for its pretty extensive catalogue of books, the ability to see reviews from other readers, and the social aspect of following what my friends are reading. However, I find both the website and the app very slow and not very well designed. Plus, I liked to minimize my interactions with Amazon. Has anyone used or built any alternatives? While the features I listed above are nice, the only ones I would really want are:

• The ability to quickly look up and add a book to my "want to read", and to keep track of books I have read
• The ability to leave notes or reviews on books (not necessarily visible to others).

I've started to keep a reading log in Notion which satisfies the second point above, but there's no easy way to search through a data base of books and add a book to one of my lists. It would be nice to be able to do so on the fly as I browse books at the store. So Tildeños, what solutions have you all come up with to track your reading?

I started studying again this semester, and have to read a lot of stuff because of it.
As we get nearly all our Books as PDF and reading on my notebook or my phone gets tiering quite fast. So I'm thinking about getting myself an e-reader to make things go easier.

So i tried to find some ressources to learn about e-readers, but the internet (or search engines) these days seem to suck.
So maybe my lovely tildes can help.

must haves:
can read PDF
needs to make reading this "shitty" two colums pages my PDF have good and easy

nice to haves:
FOSS
Backlight

can somebody help me out? or do you know about a resource where I can learn about the pro and cons of the different e-readers, I'm starting with close to 0 knowlege as I never thoght I will need one, I generally prefere to read proper books.

How and where do you like to read? Tell me all about your reading environment(s), both real and idealized. Do you sit in an arm chair with a cup of coffee and a worn paperback? Lie in bed with a cat curled up next to you in the dim glow of your ereader? Under a tree in the woods, listening to the book on your headphones? If you could find/build the perfect reading space for you, what would it look like?

And then, what about your more practical reading: on your phone on your lunch break? While waiting for your kids in the car during soccer practice? Tell me about the times you fit reading in even if it's not necessarily the full focus of the moment, or the times where you settle for a comfortable but less than ideal setup.

Include any meaningful rituals or accessories too. Do you like to put a good album on the record player to accompany you? Do you have a special bookmark that you use? Do you share your book covers on social media or livetweet each chapter? Does your favorite lamp like to look over your shoulder as you turn the pages?

Basically, tell me all about what reading looks like for you -- with enough detail so we can picture it!

For any of you who have been in a book club before. Any lessons learned? Nice to haves? Things to avoid? This is going to be limited to a fairly small group (4-6 people), so I feel like I don't need to get too formal with anything. But at the same time, I know that a good structure goes a long way to a successful regular reading club.

We have pretty a varied reading pace between us. One of us can read a book a day. I'm more at the book (300~ pages) every week or two pace myself. I'm sure that others may read faster or slower than that still. So I figure a book a month is decent for keeping to a casual-but-intentional reading pace for most of us.

Part of this is intended to be a way to keep in touch with friends I don't get to talk to as often anymore, and part of it is just reading new books I wouldn't even think to read.

I find it hard to find articles that I think more people should read.. I find most of them pretty much spam (cough medium cough). I created this thread so you can recommend some articles that you read and found interesting.

It doesn't matter about what it is, recommend away!

I buy a bunch of books each year, but it seems less than half of them get read.

Sometimes I'm just satisfied by the notion that I will eventually read the book and never get around to it.
However, I do actually go back to some of these books. For instance I bought Gene Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer/Sword of the Lictor back in 2015 but recently finished it back in summer of 2018.

Some have sat on the shelf for much longer.

Orson Scott Card's Xenocide comes to mind. I read Ender's Game back in 2013, read the sequel some time in 2014, and told myself I'd get around to the third book (Xenocide) but I never have.

Another one I picked up last year that I've been meaning to read is The Confessions of Saint Augustine.

So, what are some books you've been neglecting? Write them down here to put them to rest, or even better, to motivate yourself to actually read them!!

I feel like I'm a bit slow, though I'm gaining practice. I cannot read two moderate or long-ish papers in one day. I guess part of that reason is that the field I'm mostly reading in is a field I'm new to, though in accordance with that what I'm reading often is kindo-of introductory material (linguistics, and Linguistics Handbook ed. Aronoff, 2017). A chapter is around the size of an average paper (around 25-30 pages). Another factor may be that I'm not a native speaker of English, but I think I do have a quite decent command of it especially when reading, enough to read through ~60 A4 pages in five-six hours, but I just can't do it.

So I wonder if I'm too slow or maybe exaggerating it a bit? How long does it take for you, and how many can you read, without skimming/skipping, in a "day"?

I'm wondering what all the different ways people read here are! Do you always buy a new hardcover, or do you get everything from your library on your e-reader? Feel free to share both format and when/where/what you like to read.