my thoughts on reading vlogs after watching a lot of them lately

It's too much for my brain to comprehend. It's a lot for my "reading urge" to keep up.

At least, that was the initial reaction, by the way. In this case, I've watched quite a number of reading vlogs since the start of the month and I have no idea why I decided to do that when I rarely (and I mean VERY RARELY) watch any reading vlogs until... this month of September. Strange, right? But here's the thing. I only choose certain topics when watching reading vlogs. In my case, I chose to watch reading challenges. Like:

1. Reading for 24 hours (in various genres or specific genres)
2. Swapping screen time for reading
3. Waking up at 5 AM to have time to read
4. Reading a book a day for a week
5. Reading for 1 hour every day
6. Read 50, 100, 150, or even 200 pages a day for a week/month

Crazy challenges, if I say so myself. But, in my opinion, they're doable... if you're truly committed in completing the challenge you set to yourself. For me, though, I think I can only do the 3rd one or the 5th one. Maybe even the 6th, as well, but it depends on the number of pages. Past 50 pages... doable. 100 and above? Definitely a bit of a hell for my brain. Maybe that's why I chose to use the number range 10-70 for my random number generator whenever I'd determine the number of pages that I should read for the day. And if I get to read more than 70, then it's a YAY for me.

But who knows? Maybe I could read more than 100 pages a day at some point. But at the moment, it's a definite "no".

And then here's the question: why didn't I get myself interested in watching reading vlogs for a long while? Now I know one of the reasons why.

THE BOOK SUGGESTIONS IN EACH VLOG ㅡ and to think those were just the books mentioned in the reading challenges that the booktubers were participating at. THEY WERE INSANE! Why? A lot of them looks really good and I'm extremely worried about my TBR list. For real! Especially the trilogies and various series that have more than 300 pages in each book. My head is hurting just thinking that I'd actually want to read them and yet I still hesitate if I should.

I know I already have more than 500 e-books in my phone and also the less than 50 physical books that I have at the moment. How am I supposed to actually keep up with my long list of TBR and truly reading all of them? Sure, we'll take it one book a time, one chapter at a time, one page at a time. But let's be honest. Books can seriously become overwhelming for our mind (regardless of the genre that we want to read) that we would end up forgetting to even skim them because of it. Or at least, that's what I think has happened to me over the past year. Insane, I know.

Watching these reading vlogs over the last weeks or so has ㅡ in more ways than one ㅡ has ignited my reading urge and slowly dissipating (or should I say melting?) my long time reading slump. I mean, that's a good thing, right? At least for my mind. Not for my wallet, though. 😂😭 But one thing I learned from these reading vlogs/challenges is that I have to do it one book at a time ㅡ as long as the book keeps you hooked to the story, of course. There are definitely books that you'd DNF's no matter how much you want to finish it.

By the way... did I ever DNF'd a book in my life? Gosh, I can't remember. But I'm quite sure I did. Maybe on some of the genres that I'd truly stay away from, even as a writer. For those who knew me, maybe you know what I mean about those genres.

I also had the urge to film reading vlogs after watching a lot of these, to be honest. Even thinking on doing mine as a silent vlog type of video. But... filming for me was actually time-consuming. And at the moment, my phone doesn't have a memory card so its internal storage wouldn't be enough to store so many videos. It was a sad thing. But who knows? Maybe I'd be able to do it one of these days. How soon would that be? I'm not sure.

For now, I'm doing my reading blog like this. And as long as I can do it, I'd do it daily ㅡ regardless of the length of the entry. Sure, not many people have the time to read entries like this. But there are still some, and I'm happy with that. Writing would always be a therapeutic way of releasing stress for me. And writing blog entries like this also helps me deal with reality that would otherwise be annoying, frustrating, irritating... and most of the time, mundane and boring.

Come to think of this, I would do book reviews before here in this blog. So I don't know what made me stop doing that. But that was about 3-4 years ago, though. 😕🤔

In conclusion: I think I owe those reading challenge vlogs that I've watched this month a big thanks for becoming a way for me to do more reading and doing my best to get out of a major reading slump. It's only been 6 days since I started reading daily as I try reaching my page number quota and it's not much, sure. But I'm progressing, and it makes me happy that I have progress at something that I think I have avoided for a long while.

Maybe one day, I could film my own reading vlog. It's still unsure if I'd actually do it. But it'll be fun if it actually happens. I just need to get over my fear of facing the camera and have my face be exposed ㅡ and also talk in front of it as I tell my opinions about what I read/wrote and such. 😊✌️💕