Reader Immersion – Write on the World

By the end of 2025, my social feeds were flooded with book-count roundups. Fifty books. Eighty-seven books. One hundred books, neatly stacked in Canva graphics and celebratory captions. Mixed in among them, especially on Threads, I kept seeing the same question pop up again and again: How are people able to read 100 books in a year?

Reading isn’t a race. It’s a skill you build, a habit you choose, and a joy that looks different for everyone.

The tone of the question always felt half-amazed, half-defeated—like asking how people finish marathons when you can barely make it around the block.

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Inconsistent point of view (POV) in fiction can significantly affect the reader’s experience, often in a negative way if not handled with care. For example, readers often find William Faulkner’s novel, The Sound and the Fury, difficult to read because of its inconsistency in POV. Readers are forced to actively engage with the text, filling in gaps and reconciling differing perspectives.

Inconsistent point of view in a novel can disrupt the reader’s experience of the story as well as causing reader fatigue.

While this lack of consistency isn’t necessarily “wrong” when done with purpose, it is important for the writer to consider just how hard they want their reader to have to work to understand what they have written. You must consider your intended audience: do your readers prefer to read a novel that makes them work to tease out its meaning? Or does your target audience consist of readers who want to be fully immersed in a story without having to pause regularly to think outside of the story?

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