Hello Setonfire, and welcome to BT as a posting member!
As you may know we're interested in and curious about our "lurkers". I hope more of them will follow your example.
Also I am personally very interested in attracting members from other parts of the world, people like you can add in their perspective and viewpoint: even if you do not start with complex philosophical issues, I hope you will go on posting, beginning with what appeals to you most.
About the amount of reading people do, I can't speak for other people, but this is what I can say about myself: when I am really interested in something, fiction or non-fiction, I can read
very quickly. This is not necessarily always an advantage, as I come to the end of a good book too quickly and it makes the hobby expensive.
Also, to put things into perspective, while I was a student the amount of personal reading I did was close to zero: I was really kept busy by doing the reading professors set for us and then writing papers about it.
You mention that you study history; this is something I'm extremely interested in, as this was my second favourite subject, after English, when I was a student.
I had an amazing history teacher in my first year at College in Versailles.
One of the many things I remember from her is that she had very strong political views, which she didn't mention as such, but she always made sure that she presented different analyses of a particular topic by explaining which was "right-wing" and which was "left-wing".
This opened new vistas for me: in high school history was just history, and I thought it was studying facts as in physics or geology.
I suppose there must be other ways of analysing history than just through political lenses, but it was extremely important for me to be shown that it was not just a matter of facts, and that nothing was neutral about teaching history.
How about you? What are your favourite periods in history?
What is it about history that makes it seem a "mental asylum" to you?
How do your professors analyse the subjects?
Ophelia.