This is not actually news, but I feel like I'm noticing it more. I like the book I'm reading for class this weekend (Producing and Directing the Short Film) much better than pretty much any of the books we read last term. I feel like last term most of the reading I did was for Film Studies and frankly half way through the term I stopped reading those books. Not because they weren't interesting, they were a bit. But they were dry and it was taking forever to get through them, and they were covering the same stuff that his lectures did and his lectures were very engaging. I liked the books for screenwriting, come to think of it. And I only skimmed the production book because it was all stuff I knew.
But I digress. Here's this book that I'm reading now that is very interesting and practical and immediately applicable and I still find I can't read it for more than an hour at a time. Usually even less than that because they will make some point and my mind will drift off to how it relates to my past films or how I want it to relate to my future films.
On the one hand I think I need better discipline to make myself sit there and slog through it. On the other hand, I don't want it to become a slog. I don't want to take the joy out of it. I guess I just need to give myself enough time so that I can read it slowly and still get it done by the time I need the information in my head.
How long are the chapters? Could you save self-reflection for after completing a chapter? Seems to me that the deeper thinking is applying it to your past/present work, so doing that means you'll get more out of it. But if you self-reflect at every interesting sentence, paragraph or page, then the self-reflection might be getting a bit of kitten-head.
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