I Forgot How to Read Books!

It takes me about 20 minutes to get through 3 pages of a book. I re-read stuff 10 times and then do it another 10 times. I cannot figure out why this is the case. My brain is too noisy or something. I know it is my ADHD, but I had no idea how pronounced it has become until I tried to get back into reading a physical book.

I’ve been listening to Audible at 2x for at least 10 years and can consume content without much issue and my retention is decent. But a physical book! This is way too much effort and it shouldn’t be. I feel like I need to go to a clinic on how to quiet the mind and read a damn book.

This is two paragraphs from Dorian Gray and I don’t know how to not go slow and try to figure out what is being said. Doesn’t the mind need to think about about each sentence when they are dense with meaning like these below?

"And yet," continued Lord Henry, in his low, musical voice, and with that graceful wave of the hand that was always so characteristic of him, and that he had even in his Eton days, "I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediæval-ism, and return to the Hellenic ideal-to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret.

The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boy-hood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame-"

I think I am ready to be in a book club with several AI and maybe humans and just talk about books and figure out what is unique in each book for the time. It could be that books find us right when we need them. I am not sure I how to make sure that when the book finds me I know what to find inside the book. I have a belief that what I am to learn from a book is as personal and unique as the galaxies in the universe.

Happy 420 friends

SP

I ask MidJourney to paint a picture of Dorian Gray and this is it.