Jamie the Eclectic Witch

Just a little one today- some books by UK comedians I’ve read recently.

All good and very different, I’d particularly recommend Katy Wix’s book which she describes as a memoir ‘about cake and death’, which was really wonderful and sad.

More fantasy novels!

- 𝑵𝑯

𝑊𝑎𝑛𝑛𝑎 ℎ𝑒𝑙𝑝 𝑎 𝑠𝑚𝑎𝑙𝑙 𝑐𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑡𝑜𝑟? 𝐿𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑟𝑒𝑏𝑙𝑜𝑔! 💌💬

What a cliche title for my first blog post, but will most likely be the first of many cliches that will happen on this blog. But yes hello to you my dear reader (if this is 10 years down the line since the creation of this blog, why are you all the way back here?) and welcome to my writers blog. I feel like every author/writer has a blog in which they update their fans and put forward ideas into the world, and for the second cliche of my public writing career, I’m making one too.

  But Jamie, why should we stay and read your blog when there are so many other more established authors out there?

However the fuck you want. Thats right you can read a book however you want. You want to scribble between the lines and in the margins so much that you can barely read the book anymore? you can do that. You want to keep a not book by your side and any ideas you have or vocabulary you want to use you write down? You can do that. Don't let anyone tell you how to read. No if you want tips on how to read faster you can certainly let the experts give you tips on how to read faster, but reading is meant to be enjoyed in your own special way.

Now if you were to look up; How to read a Book, on google firstly what would come is a book from 1940 that has the very informative title: How to Read a Book, then secondly you would come across these four terms: Elementary, Inspectional, Analytical and Synoptical. To explain what each of these mean I'll let the lovely people over at The Art of Manliness explain....

Elementary — This is just what it sounds like. It’s what we learn in elementary school and basically gets us to the point that we can understand the words on a page and read them, and follow a basic plot or line of understanding, but not much more.

Inspectional — This is basically skimming. You look at the highlights, read the beginning and end, and try to pick up as much as you can about what the author is trying to say. I’ll bet you did plenty of this with high school reading assignments; I know I did. Think of SparkNotes when you think of inspectional reading.

Analytical — This is where you really dive into a text. You read slowly and closely, you take notes, you look up words or references you don’t understand, and you try to get into the author’s head in order to be able to really get what’s being said.

Syntopical — This is mostly used by writers and professors. It’s where you read multiple books on a single subject and form a thesis or original thought by comparing and contrasting various other authors’ thoughts. This is time and research intensive, and it’s not likely that you’ll do this type of reading very much after college, unless your profession or hobby calls for it.

me? I do a combination of Elementary, Inspectional, and Analytical, mostly leaning towards the analytical side of reading, but mostly because i like the aesthetic of a heavily annotated book ( you should see my copy of The Secret History by Donna Tart), the added bonus of retaining the information is just that, an added bonus.