357
Jude the Obscure
A fat book is a nice thing to develop attention span. Now I can see how easy it’s to read a book when my attention is focused on it totally. The bigger is a book, the more opportunities are there for the development. Really, it’s completely different from the way I worked earlier. I mean, I used to be engaged in many activities like reading, speaking, writing, and listening; I did lots of different exercises and my attention jumped always from one thing to another, so it was hard to focus on something for a long time because everything became boring pretty fast. I think it mostly depends on my ability to understand the meaning, but I also want to add that it’s important to focus on something big and for that time get rid of anything else. When I read books in Russian I was able to focus on a whole gathering of collected works of some great thinker and absorb his thoughts by reading a couple of thousands of pages less than for a month. Then, when I switch my reading to English, it was difficult to focus even on 10 pages. I had to develop many habits to be able to understand the language. Now, it seems, I’m in a position where it’s actually makes no difficulty to focus on a big book and read it for several days without doing anything else. Perhaps writing may help me with all of this, because I can simply set up some goals, as I did it with other things like courses of lectures for example, and then I can observe through writing how I’m doing with the process of accomplishing these goals. Now I’m on the way of finishing “Jude the Obscure” and before to start reading a next book I have to think about how long it may take and whether I’m able to do it at once or not.
To the beginning: http://www.proza.ru/2018/03/10/1530
Next: http://www.proza.ru/2019/06/22/1031