How to Conquer Big Books!

If you’re having problems reading big books: Here are five tips!
#bigbooks #amreading #bookreviews #booktube
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0:00 Intro
2:42 Tip #1 Expectations
5:25 Tip #2 Research
10:00 Tip #3 Slow but steady
12:49 Tip #4 Combo’s
14:43 Tip #5 Buddies
16:54 Extra: After you've finished
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Read along with me!
1. Three classics I want to read in the second half of 2024

2. Sandy’s 1001 Books Bookclub
January – No book
February - The Princess of Cleves by Madame Lafayette (192 pages)
March - The Well Of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (448 pages)
April - Hideous Kinky by Esther Freud (192 pages)
May - The Waves by Virginia Woolf (304 pages)
June – Love’s Work by Gillian Rose (170 pages)
July - The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner (383 pages)
September - The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen (320 pages)
October - The Real Charlotte by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (415 pages)
November - Anagrams by Lorrie Moore (240 Pages)
December - Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair (86 pages)

Name of my YouTube channel:

Find me elsewhere:

I also wrote some books:
Fiction:
available in Dutch

also available in Dutch, French, Italian, Greek, Danish, Hebrew and Turkish

Non-fiction (available only in Dutch):

Crime novels under the pen name Britta Bolt (together with writer Rodney Bolt)
The Posthumus Mysteries:
- Lonely Graves (2014)
- Lives Lost (2015)
- Deadly Secrets (June 2016)

and for German readers:
- Das Büro der einsamen Toten (2015)
- Das Haus der verlorenen Seelen (2016)
- Der Tote im fremden Mantel (February 2017)

[azu_rikka]

I like all your tips and also use them frequently.
Two more things that I do sometimes are:
Read classics according to original publication order. It takes months, but I always write a short summary before I read the next installment, and so the story stays with me better.
With classics, I also try to keep a "first reader's mind, " meaning that I try to read it like a person might have read it at the time, with all its social and political context. It often makes the book more interesting and enjoyable.

[zubooks]

Thank you for all these tips! I started again reading really big books (1000 pages and more) last year, hadn't really done it since I was a teenager. One more tip that works for me is to is to "arbitrarily" split the books into 50 to 100 pages chunks with post-its or small pieces of paper, usually at the end of a chapter or a paragraph. I don't read those chunks in one go, but getting to remove my post-it once I got to that point gives me some sense of accomplishment, and it motivates me to go on.

[janicemacdougall]

These are great tips and I do most of them which has added to the enjoyment of reading big books! 😊📚

[mementomoriadam]

Yay for big books and yay for us tackling big books together this year !

[ronwarrenmusic]

hey, Britta. Thank you so much for this great advice. You remain my fave BookTuber. May I add that sometimes, research can be helpful for more recent books as well. For example, to me, reading Alexis Wright feels like sitting around a fire listening to my Indig elders tell stories. Pretty comfortable, really. But if you have not had that experience, maybe getting some basic insight into Indig world view and oral story telling might be helpful. I don't know if this happens for you, but often when I am reading a new author it can take 40, 70, even 100 pages to begin to really hear the authors voice. When that happens, I like to give myself permission to start over from the beginning once I think I am really starting to hear the author. Anyway, thanks again. See you next video.

[MyMessyBookshelf]

Wonderful tips. I often enjoy pairing with an audiobook which I will listen to while in the car and doing chores and I always find it helpful.

[anneworks]

Hi Britta! Excellent tips, well explained. I use the every day method as well and I tend to start big books around now, so I can finish them in the fall or Christmas holidays. I also sometimes read one to about half way, give up and try again a few years later. Usually that does the trick. With the magic mountain it took 3 times. If I reread, I'll look up much more about it.

[cuppa.books.]

I think the first big classic I tackled was War & Peace, I read it in 50 page chunks but I had only given myself a month to read it, the time pressure helped. Now, I don't have any problems reading bigger classic books, I think partly because I actually enjoyed W&P a lot more than I thought I would.

[jenf]

Great tips, thank you. Enjoyed your presentation and feel motivated!

[hildeherbold]

Thank you for your tips. Now I feel ready to tackle Middlemarch and other long books.

[bookreview]

That is so important, managing expectations. Middlemarch was just something I want to have read but never really expected to love it. Still sad I didn't get to finish Genji, but going for the audiobook was not a good choice of format there. Maybe I should try your edition, with annotations next.

[katjakrull]

Great advice as always. I just want to comment that sometimes we have to grow into a book. I remember that I tried to read Anna Karenina when I was in my twenties. Could not get through it. I tried again in my thirties, another failure. I did finish it with joy when I was in my forties. Just needed to mature for the book. 😅

[dorlynnstarn]

Very helpful tips, thank you! I have been reading a lot of big books these past few years, The Tale of Genji, Washburn edition as the latest. I find that once you finish big books, they become less intimidating. These tips are a great way to begin.😃

[emmavd]

🤣Marie-Kondo it!!!🤣Thanks, Britta!🌷Excellent pieces of advice, all five of them! I usually read the end notes when I’m referred to them in the text. However, I agree on the unpleasant breaking of the reading rhythm and of the enjoyment of the author’s style. This is why, if a passage is dense with notes, I reread it immediately after having read the notes. My latest combination of modern classic + 725 pages was Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec. Something which helped me decide to read it, knowing I’d most probably enjoy it, was reading a shorter work by the same author first (Things). I’m aware of the fact that it may not work with all authors, but in this case, for me, it did😊

[kawaiiwitchbaby]

I had planned to read Middlemarch as a year long read a long and I didn’t even get 4 months in because I loved the book so much I finished it all! 😅

[majelthesurreal]

I I enjoyed your perspective on this very much. It will be very helpful.
My past attempts: I joined a booktube group to read Tomb of sand. Maybe, as you said, it was too large a people but I realized fairly quickly that I was not keeping up. I didn't understand enough about the politics and the hierarchies in India and what changes had happened in the country. I did enjoy listening to the people who did have that information and to hear how much they we're enjoying the book.
For two other Mammoth books I did, as you suggest here, read 35 pages a day, my goal. It worked very well. Luminaries is up next for me. Gulp.

[heyitslori]

Last year I read Clarissa, which clocks in at 1783 pages. I did like you said and read just a few pages a day. Took me several months but I finished it! I like having a big book that I just read little by little like that.

[ianp]

#3 is absolutely right - it has worked for me a few times, and I get a few short novels read at the same time!

[LouiseReader]

Great points Britta, you can't approach a lot of these books the same way you do normal sized books. I use audio, not just to get into the book, but to get through it. Audio really does help with foreign names and pronunciation. This can even be books written in English. I'm thinking of Hannah Kent's Burial Rites, not that long, but set in 19th century Iceland, and full of Icelandic names. I'm listening to Hisham Matar's My Friends at the moment, which is longish for me, and enjoying the Arabic and Libyan pronunciations.

I got through Moby Dick on audio 8-10 years ago. I know that thre is absolutely no way that my interest could have withstood reading the actual book. But I downloaded a free version where each chapter was narrated by a different person. Some famous and accomplished, Simon Callow, Tilda Swinton. Some just regular people who weren't that great as narrators. I listened to it whenever I took my dogs for a walk. And only then. I had absolutely no expectation to listen to it at other times. I enjoyed it that way, with reservations, and never need to read it again!

[alexandrahinrichsen]

You just gave me a strategy for next semester when I have to get through a 1000 pages textbook. Thank you!!