> I discovered that I don’t actually read names, I just pattern match, and I have sometimes gotten hundreds of pages into a novel before I realize that I have no clear sense of the the middle syllables of the protagonist’s name.
Same. TIL this is not just me being lazy.
I did the same for a long time, but the diminuitives and nicknames for characters made that too hard to do, so I just ate the acorn and learned a bit about patronyms, pronunciation, etc...