Recently I tried reading two works: after the TV series ended I rode the wave of enthusiasm and read a few pages of Sword Snow Stride, and recently I picked up Big Breasts and Wide Hips. I found it hard to get into either of them.
I realized I’ve come down with a kind of “reading laziness.” The symptoms go like this, and I only diagnosed myself by comparing with two books I finished a while ago: Golden Thumb and Biochemical Nanny. A shared feature of the two earlier books I mentioned is that they devote a lot of ink to scene description. In Sword Snow Stride it’s the character descriptions; in Big Breasts and Wide Hips it’s the descriptions of the qingke fields and the great stallion. These all make it harder for me to get deep into the story. By contrast, the two fairy tales by Zheng Yuanjie that I read smoothly are more story‑driven; the scenes are all everyday life scenes that are easy to picture, and the author spends more effort on the characters’ inner lives, which adds fun without affecting immersion in the story.
Thinking about this, it seems what I want from reading is more the story itself, rather than the language or the writing style. On closer thought, that’s not much different from watching dramas or scrolling through the Film & TV section on Bilibili: I just want to hear stories and can’t be bothered to slowly chew through the text.
Then I got to the line “I heard the sound of breathing sprayed from the flower horse’s nostrils, and smelled the scent of sour horse sweat,” and realized I’m still quite susceptible to vivid description. And the very descriptions that fail to draw my interest are actually an important source of nourishment in reading; they’re just a bit harder to absorb.
One difference between reading and binge‑watching shows is that with reading you can reconstruct the author’s imagination for yourself—provided, of course, that your brain is willing to burn a bit more energy.