Thursday, January 21, 2010

Something Unsettling is Happening to Me...

I may be losing my ability to read. I don't mean that I can't read any sentence placed in front of me, I can, very quickly and read it out too. I am very literate still. My problem is in passages exceeding a paragraph lenght, if we define a paragraph as a passage of three or more sentences that go together. It starts feeling like the information travels through a fog to reach the relevant part of my brain for interpretation and absorption.

This has been going on for about a week now. At first I thought it was just the book I was reading, A Sudden Wild Magic, by Diana Wynne Jones. She is one of my favourite authors and writes young adult fiction so it should be an easy read but wrong. I have a lot of trouble keeping it straight in my head. I have trouble separating the characters and remembering where I am in the plot. Sometimes she is rather hard to follow because of her tendency to jump from one location to another, but not with out warning, so I figured that it was just the book. It was not. Last night I was reading my father's blog. Yes my about 65 year old father not only knows what a blog is but writes one. It is in Finnish and about personal theology (vs serious academic theology) and faith. I struggled to read it and the comments tacked to the end by readers, many very long. This morning I tried to read some friends personal blogs in English and ran into the same problem.

I hope this is only temporary. I really enjoy the printed word. I do not read as much as I did when I was a teenager due to some heavy debts to the local library along with an unfair charge of ruining a book that was already water damaged when I checked it out. I want to read more. I think the last books I actually finished was The Silent Planet and Till We have Faces, A Myth Retold both by C.S. Lewis along with The Gospel According to Larry by Janet Tashian. That was almost a year ago and then about a half year before that I read a book about the history of the evolution creation struggle written by some philosopher, it was very interesting and I learned a lot and right before that, actually a matter of hours, I finished a mystery novel called Raven Mocker. That is definitely not counting all the books I started and never finished. I may lack resolve and I am definitely that girl who in high school would read all night because she lived in the book she was reading and regardless of her slowness in reading would happily read Les Miserables (is that what it is called, I read it in Finnish and it is called Kurjat) by Victor Hugo for light summer reading.

2 comments:

  1. Have you considered being assessed for Adult ADHD?

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  2. Yes, I have considered that and once almost got tested but I can't really justify the expense. In the mean while I just have to keep putting double the energy into reading.

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