Synchronous Reading - A Challenge with Eve!

If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you should know Eve - she wrote a couple of times around here: once about her first World Cafe and another time about a cool journalism experience. One thing you might not know about Eve is that she is my reading pal. We talk about Stephen King and literary theory and all sorts of bookish stuff. Whenever I want to talk about books, I message her.

How did we come up with this… Synchronous Reading Challenge? Eve always tells me that I read very fast. While I know I’ve learned how to read efficiently during my BA in English Lit, I don’t consider myself a very fast reader. I usually sacrifice some attention to detail in favour of speed, which isn’t necessarily good. Today we are starting the same book at the same time and keeping track of how much each of us reads. Coincidentally, we have the exact same edition of Marin Preda’s ‘Moromeții’*, so it will be quite easy to compare and contrast.

‘Moromeții’ is part of the Romanian Literary canon and one of the books that we have to study for our final exams. I know it has some anti-communist discourse and sub-themes, which is interesting given that it was written under the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej regime under very limited freedom of speech. Also, Preda was presumably murdered for his novel ‘Cel Mai Iubit dintre Pământeni’ (The Most Beloved of Earthlings) which overtly criticises the Stalinist era.

* I can’t translate that. The title is a surname in the plural, like *the Flintstones*, but it’s the Morometes.

Some useful links
Marin Preda: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marin_Preda  
‘Moromeții’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morome%C8%9Bii 
Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gheorghe_Gheorghiu-Dej 
‘Cel Mai Iubit dintre Pământeni’ (The Most Beloved of Earthlings): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel_mai_iubit_dintre_p%C4%83m%C3%A2nteni