Struggle 1: Yikes. I start a new blog and then I start working so much the last thing I want to do when I get home is sit at the computer longer and blog. Well, I have too many ideas floating around to not keep blogging, and I like this blog too much to let it fall by the wayside. So, be on the lookout for more frequent updates from me coming in the future, hopefully at regular intervals of at least once per week. I’m posting this here so I can keep myself accountable. Thank you.

Struggle 2: This actually has something to do with this blog’s content of media consumption. I recently started reading Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which is excellent and will have its own blog post when I finish it. I bought it in hardcover, one of the first books I’ve bought in hardcover in, honestly, probably years. Ever since I got my B&N Nook in 2012, I just haven’t purchased a lot of physical books. And when I do, they’re often mass-market paperbacks, or paperbacks for $15 or less. I have a hard time buying a book for more than that when I know I can get it on my e-reader for $2.99 if I catch it at the right time.

The problem with purchasing books on my Nook though, I’ve realized, is that I struggle to get through them. Even if it’s a good book–or even a half decent book–I just have a hard time picking it up when I could binge Angel on Netflix instead. Now, if it’s a great book (like The Night Circus or The Devil in the White City, both of which I’ve read on my Nook), I don’t notice much of a problem finishing them. But if I’m not absolutely in love with it (like Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that I’ve been slogging through for seven months or Great Expectations that I somehow never had to read in school), I constantly find myself pulling up how many pages there are until the end of the chapter and trying to reward myself for getting that far.

I think the biggest problem with my Nook is that it doesn’t convert page numbers pending how big your font size is. So if my book is 750 pages and a chapter is 10 pages long, that’s just how long it is. If my font is big enough that one page in the chapter is actually two Nook display pages, it will still say the chapter is 10 pages long, even though I’ll be “turning” the page 20 times. Along with that, it won’t change the page number at the bottom. So if I’m on page 225/750, but, again, my font is big enough that one Nook page is only half a “real” page, I’m still on page 225/750, even though I’ve “turned” the page. This, along with there being no physical sense of completion of watching pages move from one side of the book to another as I read, makes it so hard to feel like I’ve made any progress. No matter how hard I try, I feel like I’ll never finish the book, and there won’t be any satisfaction when I do, so why bother?

Maybe this is something only a few book people ever even think about, but if you struggle with this, too, please, let’s commiserate together. Also, real books never have this problem:

Seriously.