Guide To Reading Big Books

This morning I was on the train reading Dragonfly In Amber by Diana Gabaldon, and thought to myself 'oh how I love reading big books'. Now everybody thinks about them this way, though. Big books can be quite terrifying, believe me, there are some books I've been putting off for like a year now. Despite that, I'm still going to give you some tips for it you want to read bigger books.

Question Of The Day:
How do you like to tackle reading big books?

Chapter By Chapter

Try to see the book chapter by chapter, When you read another chapter, don't think about how much there is still left to read; think about how you've tackled another chapter in this enormous book, which is great. If you stop worrying about how much there is yet to be read in a book, you'll notice how much easier it is to get through a big book.

Break It Up In Parts

This may seem so strange to some people out there, but I have noticed how reading a gigantic book becomes a lot easier when you break the book into parts. I do only recommend this method if you have a good memory of what books are about and events that happened, because otherwise you won't have a great time. But what exactly do I mean with breaking up a book in parts?

It's very simple: read the book till a point where you are just too overwhelmed by the size of it (this usually happens to me like halfway through), put it down and read another book in between.

*gasp* how can you just stop reading a book halfway through???!!!!!!

It may seem horrible to some readers out there, but once you're reading the other book, you will find yourself wanting to continue the other book and if this doesn't happen, just read another one. Eventually you will want to continue your other book, I promise. I read Outlander a while back and read 5 books in between that one before I wanted to continue again (I have to admit that I was in a reading slump) and suddenly I just really wanted to continue and read the final 200 pages in 2 days.

Set A Daily Goal

Yes, set a goal for yourself of the amount of pages you want to read that day. In the beginning it might feel like you're pushing yourself to read the book, but this feeling will go away, I promise.

A daily goal also feels amazing when you reach the goal and actually read more than you originally planned. That way it will feel like you are getting through the book faster than you first thought.

Set A Lower Reading Goal

This tip is more for people like me who enjoy reading big books often: Set a lower reading goal. Big books will take you more time to read than smaller ones, this is a fact. So when you plan on reading a lot of big books, you'll need more time. Let's say you could've read 2 or 3 smaller books in the time it took you to read 1 big one, but you set a goal for the amount of smaller books you read, you'll get behind on your reading goal.

I don't know if you're like me, but I hate being behind on my reading goal and I have to reach it by the end of the year. So if you set a too-high goal for reading big books and see than you're behind, you won't want to read another big book, because that'll take you long as well. I guess you get where I'm going.

Some big books (over 500 pages) that are worth your time:

• The Song Of Ice And Fire Series by George R R Martin

• The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon

• The Kingkiller Chronicles by Patrick Rothfull

• The Mistborn Trilogy by Brandon Sanderson

• The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons 

• Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare

• The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak

• All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

~  Amber