as small as a world and as large as alone

3:17am June 25, 2015

bittersnurr:

clatterbane:

santorumsoakedpikachu:

deathlygristly:

I have been googling and reading more about why people don’t read, and what they choose to read when they do read, and the vast culture of snobbery and judging that I did not know about before I had internet access, and only slowly cottoned on to when strangers on the internet flamed me for what books I talked about and what I said about writing and I tried to figure out why they said those things.

I don’t know. Maybe I am just ignorant as a result of being born with…certain cognitive privileges, I guess you could say?

I’ve never found a book to be “hard” or “dense” or “challenging”. On the flipside I’ve never found a book to be “easy” or “fluff”. I just read things, and if I don’t like them I usually stop reading them.

I guess some stuff that I don’t like could maybe be called “dense” by some people, but to me it came across as bad writing and someone trying way way too hard to sound all complex and deep and intellectual when really they were just dressing up tiny bite sized unimpressive ideas.

This all goes back to my neverending angst about other humans perceiving reality through all these weird filters that I don’t get, and it upsets me because I feel like what I have to say can’t get past those filters.

Also there’s the whole thing where I feel extremely existentially terrified about sharing a planet with these people who have a tendency to act out their very idiosyncratic perception of reality on reality, which ends in things like other living beings suffering greatly because some humans took some silly notion into their heads about people with their skin tone or their genitals or their same species being superior to all other living beings.

Also I am writing this at work with a browser that does not play well with Tumblr and does not allow editing or even going to another tab because when I come back I won’t be able to type in the box anymore, so what I write at work is extremely unedited.

But anyway, yeah. Where do people get these ideas about “status” or “hierarchy” or whatever, and why do they apply them to books? And why do they assume that everyone else is just like them, and that therefore I must be lying or pretentious or a snob or something when I share what books I’ve read and enjoyed?

Testing??????

I’ve typed up and lost a response to this twice. The tumblr app doesn’t want me to talk about this, I guess…

You may need to put it in a separate post. :/ The app loves to eat longer commentary on reblogs, but it should work fine as a text post with a link back to the OP.

Very annoying, though.

I was an early/fast reader and never thought much about it because it didn’t really occur to me why someone wouldn’t read.

And then I experienced skill loss in college and I can’t read well anymore.

Reading stopped being fun. It’s hard now, it’s a chore. It takes me several times longer to read things and I never absorb the whole thing correctly. It’s not a disaster with like a post on tumblr, but it means novels are suddenly inaccessible because i can’t even keep track of what is going on.

And then I realized how snobby people were. It’s bad enough to deal with people who think they are better then you over a hobby but it’s a whole different level when it’s a hobby you used to love and can’t do anymore and they are still shaming you. It hurts enough one of my favorite things to do isn’t fun anymore, but it hurts on a whole different level when you are basically mocked for not being able to enjoy it anymore.

Like I would rather people make fun of me for being in a wheelchair at least I never loved to walk. Making fun of me for being unable to read books tv shows and movies I like are based on when I WANT to read them just kills me.

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