How Skyrim Helps Me Read

To me, Skyrim and my books have always gone hand in hand. For the most part they aren't related in any way that means anything significant, yet they both play a part with each other. 


1) Skyrim is notorious for its long loading screens. I've played the game enough to know every image and every chunk of information that is displayed during the loading screens, and so, I whip out a book and on good/bad days I can get two or three pages covered per loading screen. I fast travel on the game, which is another loading screen. They happen every time you enter a dungeon, go to a shop, visit a main city, go into a house etc. It leaves a lot of time of staring at a screen. I read while it loads, that's how I read Retribution Falls.


2) Sometimes I'll be trying to unlock a master locked door/chest and after forty odd lockpicks I'll usually give up and read while I let myself calm down. The ambient music usually has me absorbed in the book very quickly, and I forget all about the expensive weapons and attire that could be in the chest/storeroom. I usually read a goof thirty pages before hearing a certain patter that's like raindrop beats, and mistake it for the sunken ship level on Okami, then realize it's Skyrim, and start playing again.


3) Going around Skyrim with very little holding capacity left after deciding I'm going to carry around my Deadric Armour and a Deadric Bow/War Axe/Sword, I get very bored of having to decide what to drop, even though I'd like to sell all of it. The main cause of it is having dragon bones, which weigh a tonne on the character. So up comes the book and the same things happens as in reason two.


Actually, one of the only reasons I play Skyrim is to read. I read the smaller books though, the 300 page novels that seemed interesting enough for me to overlook their medium font size and lack of pages -I have a love for Epics, or books over 680 pages long. I tend to avoid smaller novels, unless written by Adam Roberts. Skyrim's long loading sequences and rage-inducing lockpicking system technically aided me in the reading of smaller books. 


The smallest book I've read since I started taking a real interest was 275 pages long (Soul Eater by Michelle Paver), and the biggest was 877 pages (Perdido Street Station by the ever-brilliant China Mieville).