I’ve really really tried, but I have just run out of patience for reading a 200+ page books, or maybe it is time I have run out of.🧐 I will admit that I have never been a novel reader. Almost every book I have read in the last 40 years has been about history, religion, or government/politics. Long fictional novels has never been my venue.

But, now even the novel length books on the above topics don’t interest me anymore. I kinda think it is because I have so much more I want to learn and not enough time to begin to even get there. Now when I read books I usually read the first page of a section and scan looking for anything relevant until I reach the last page, as those are the areas that likely have the most information. It seems to me that too many authors spend 200 words explaining something when 20 would be more than enough.

I know a big part of this is probably not the author’s fault. Most publisher demand that any book must be at least 200 pages long. If it is too thin, they cannot set the price at a high enough level to get a healthy profit. Maybe the internet is partially at fault here to. They go to the other extreme. Everything must be able to be read in less than 5 minutes. Yeah, I like to go in-depth on many topics, but I choose to do it on my terms. Just Google any topic and you will have hundreds of articles from which to choose. Of course the first part of that choice is to try to discern if the source author is reputable.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I often read multipage articles on subjects of interest. My absolute word limit seems to be around 20,000 words (40 pages). If it exceeds that I go into the skim mode as described above. Does all this mean that I am a “jack of all trades, but a master of none”? To a degree that is true, but once you have spent hours and hours learning the details via piece here and there you eventually become a master. 😉