Are you an imaginative reader?
Last week on Friday Coffee Chat we talked about whether or not big name reviews were important to us and most of us get our book recommendations from people we trust rather than a nameless person that doesn’t know anything about us. However, some of us felt that the big name review often trickled down to our reading lists because the books that are reviewed by big name media outlets are often heavily marketed.
Make sure you check out Jennifer at Girls Gone Reading for this week’s Friday Coffee Chat and last week’s chat on the books that turned you into a reader.
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This week on Friday Coffee Chat I wanted to ask how many of us are imaginative readers. What do I mean by this? I am a slow reader. Why? I’m slow because I often imagine EVERYTHING about a book—the setting, the characters, their accents, what clothes they are wearing, and how they wear their hair among other things. It’s so bad that I even sometimes read out loud to myself trying to imitate whatever accent I think the character speaks. If there isn’t a lot of dialogue, I imagine the narration to be by some fabulous actor or actress with a wonderful voice that just fits the book perfectly. I even do this with non-fiction books no matter what they are.
I think that classifies me as an imaginative reader (this is a term I just made up—who knows what it’s really called…probably GOOFY!). I know people that tend to speed read and they don’t necessarily create the entire world in their head. To me, the concept of this is completely foreign. I wouldn’t comprehend anything, but all these people have excellent reading comprehension and often remember just as much or more than I do once they are done with the book.
I also have a tendency to change the “look” of the character if I don’t like the way they are described. I am not a fan of flowing, long, man hair so whenever there is a character written with long hair, I usually change it in my mind to short and some actor I think is handsome. Is that weird?!!! Probably! I do the same thing for girls. There is such a shortage of female characters that are minorities in the books I read that I never feel like I could ever put myself in their shoes since I could never look like them. Is that weird?! Probably! Either way, they get switched to Asian or Hispanic or Black or any other minority in my head sometimes just for variety and to know that yes, I could be a character in a book!
So my questions for you readers this week are:
- Are you an imaginative reader? Do you build the world and characters in your head?
- Are you a speed reader and you don’t imagine anything while reading—you just comprehend it all and move on?
- Could you ever fathom trying the opposite of what you do when you read?
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