#step.books

When I was 11, I read the book Ender's Game for some school assignment or another. I don't remember ever considering Ender a relatable character, but certainly my understanding of the events was shaped by being of an age to see the protagonist not so much as a young child but as someone of my peer group, someone who could have been slotted amongst my classmates without anybody batting an eye.

Over a decade later, I read the sequel, Speaker for the Dead; it takes place many years later, when Ender is in his thirties, and my feelings about the in-universe time skip were undeniably shaped by the real life time gap between my reading of the novels. Reading the first book back then and then the second book now created a feeling where it's almost like, I'm browsing the facebook page of someone I had known in middle school but lost contact with, checking up on how they're doing today. The real-time factor caused me to perceive it less like a timeskip, and more like a reunion - the feelings were closer to "oh wow, that's my boy! I haven't seen him in years! Wonder what he's up to?" Which in turn gave me a better position to appreciate the parts of the narrative about him struggling to find a place in his adulthood than I would have been had I perceived it more strictly as a quick skip from 11 to 20 to 36.

While musing about this, I considered a VN I played a few years back, which took place over three in-game days - except at the end of one in-game day, the game would lock you out from progressing for 24 hours real time. So that as the in-game investigator protagonist was ruminating on the information that had been discovered that day, the player would be forced to do the same. In this example, by forcing the player to experience the same timeframe as the in-game characters, the sense of it being an in-depth and extensive investigation increases, even though without the forced pauses the game would be short enough to blow through in a handful of hours real-time.

Which brings to mind how time effects things in long-running serial works. It's well known that an audience which watches an episode or reads a chapter week by week has a very different experience than one binging through whole seasons or volumes at a time, but I wonder if the real time relative to the in-universe time makes that effect stand out more? Fight scenes, for instance, have been known to take up several chapters in certain manga or webnovels. What does it do to the reader's perception, if from their point a view a fight takes a whole month, while for the characters they read about it's only been a couple hours? Readers might feel that the situation is more stressful, since the pressure of the fight has been ongoing for a long time for them, while in-universe it was a rough afternoon but no more than that. Contrastingly, when a series skips ahead or otherwise has long periods of time for characters that feel short for readers, it can feel like no time has passed and everything is still the same, unless the author really stresses the differences in world-state that occurred offscreen. Because the reader hasn't changed at all.

Currently reading a book whose main character is a teenage girl obsessed with music, growing up in 1980s Mexico. And to demonstrate this the characters stop and talk about music every few pages, discussing songs, singers, and albums that were popular at the time. I'm not even much of a music person but I ended up keeping a list of different songs and such so I could keep track of the characters' tastes and maybe look at stuff later, the character's enthusiasm is infectious.

It gives the impression that the writer too has a great deal of affection for the music of the era too. Maybe the author, too, was once upon a time a teenage girl obsessed with music, growing up in 1980s Mexico.

Anyway ever since I first heard of the story I had wondered if I could maybe do some kind of hell run where every time he recs a book, I stop reading and go read that book. Now this would be a terrible idea, first, because of the sheer amount of books that would be, well into the triple digits; second, because it would be very bad on the pacing and flow of reading the actual webnovel; and third, because some of those books by themselves would be rough as heck. Like I remember there were a couple children's books in there that would be easy, a few normal novels that I could simply throw onto my reading pile, but there was also shit like "the collected works of Nietzsche" which may take me a long time just for that one rec. (Actual example that I remember.)