19 Minutes Book Review Novels & Stories

Why some packs rose, why others crumbled into dust. Light reading. The kind of thing normal people grabbed when they couldn't sleep. Or when they were secretly unhinged. She didn't consider herself a fast reader, yet the moment she opened it the pages pulled her in, each chapter feeling disturbingly familiar, like scattered memories rising too quickly to the surface. Her brain was doing that thing again, the thing she refused to name, where information locked into place like it had been waiting for her to catch up. She devoured the entire book before he returned. Six hundred pages. In under two hours. She would take that particular detail to her grave.

I knew there would be work to be done but these books would take months to read. "No, you will get to read them but for the work we have to do now, I have a summary." She produced what looked like a long novel. "This is something my predecessor wrote. It is a bit more concise with only six volumes." She handed it to me. I took the book with reverence. "It contains everything you need. The plan is for you to read a section in two days and the next evening, we can take a short walk and discuss what you've read," she said as she set the other books aside.

She had been waiting to read the book, but she was interrupted by unfortunate events the previous night. Flipping through the first page, she continued to the prologue where the story began. Arlene was too engrossed with the book that she didn’t notice that she had passed a lot of time. The book contained 30 chapters and she had read fifteen chapters at a go. She stopped reading when she heard her stomach rumble, so she closed the book and checked the time on her phone, it was 4 pm already. She turned on her data to check her i*******m feed and the writer’s forum she was on for updates.

Arva stared. Instantly the thick book was back in Noura's palm. "I put it in my hand." Noura realized one thing. Why is the process so long? Usually, it only takes a second. Now three seconds. Is there something wrong with her? Noura recently felt her strength weaken. Arva's permission to see the contents of the book. Noura just nodded with a tilted smile on her face. Arva opened from the first page to the last page, but all she saw was a blank sheet of paper. She also asked for an explanation from Noura.

I entered mine, went through the three books I had gotten from the store, and set them down on the bed. I folded my arms and read their names. The Claiming Rites, Finding the One, and Under the Red Moon. There was no order in which anyone should read these books, so I sat down and picked up The Claiming Rites. After an hour, I finished reading. The book made zero sense, and then I picked up Finding the One and spent another hour reading through it. While the first book was incomplete, the second made a little more sense. I picked up the third, which I had gone to Zion’s room with. I took my time reading, and another hour went by.

I pulled out the book that I needed and huffed when I felt the sudden weight of it in my arms. I placed the book back on my table, but the stupid book made a loud noise on the desk, and I winced in embarrassment. Thankfully nobody paid any attention to me. I spread out all my books and started engaging myself with the work for the next two hours. ----- I looked at my watch to see that I still had forty-five minutes left before the bust that I usually went in would make an appearance. I had finished most of the things that I was supposed to do for the day. I stretched myself out on the chair, my back hurting from bending over my books for so long.

As I delved into the pages of the book, the doubts that once lingered in the room filled my mind, challenging me to prove them wrong. Hours passed, and as I neared the end of the book, the elusive answer remained beyond my grasp. Frustration and doubt began creeping in, a heavy weight on my shoulders as the ticking of the watch echoed the passing time, a constant reminder of the dwindling time. Knowing I had less than two hours left increased my anxiety level from lack of solutions, and despite the efforts I had spent in hours of reading, inspiration eluded me, leaving me on the verge of despair.

This is the story of the floor I was standing on when I learned to do it. She stopped. She read the words back to herself. It wasn't a speech. It was slower, far more interior—a quiet, breathing thing that didn't feel the frantic pressure to resolve itself in a twenty-minute climax. She realized that the slowness she had feared was actually the entire point. Speeches landed and ended. Books stayed. A book would live inside a stranger at three in the morning. It would be kept on a nightstand, returned to in moments of quiet desperation, its margins heavily underlined.

She knew it was honest. The second book was seventy pages into its first draft. The chapter on the long middle was the hardest chapter and it was going slowly and she was not rushing it. The second book would take two years, probably. She had two years. She had more than two years — Petra was right, the room was large. Darius read the seventy pages in a single evening. He said: "The chapter on the long middle is the best thing you've written." "It is not finished," she said.

Then Kevin took the book and opened it. For no reason, Kevin smiled thinly as he looked at the book, "now I'm the one to say thank you to you" Kevin muttered to himself. Kevin started reading the Indonesian History book. It took Kevin 25 minutes to read the book until it finished. When finished, Kevin got up from his seat.