And let's be honest, you often need it. The "livening-up" I mean.
AND .. I invented it ... but like many other of my "inventions" they usually turn out to be well known way back in the past.. often scratched on the giant pillars of Stonehenge, or painted on the lids of sarcophagi (?) deep inside those pyramid scheme thingys in the desert.
Here's what you do ... you're just starting the 46th chapter of " Hanes Llanrug" and you're looking forward to more old guff about the Mad Woman of Tan-y-Coed Uchaf back in 1436 .So you really need to liven things up a bit ... give yourself a reason to live /sorry, carry on reading ... so here's what you do ..
You make yourself a list of special words you might expect to find in that chapter, a sort of bucket list... and then, when they turn up, and you have correctly predicted them, you score points. Seeing as this chapter is about mad women and witches and potions and poor sanitation and terrible diseases and declining bus services and low levels on literacy, + widespread inbreeding and genetic drift, you've got plenty of possible target words.
Here's the sort of list you might make ... from most likely to least likely ... we'll have twelve of them....
[1] blewog
[2] pwdr
[3] hyll
[4] cath
[5] aroglog
[6] crawn
[7] sgwrnog
[8] chwilen
[9] cyfaredd
[10] dafaden
[11] het bigfain
[12] hofel
So ... as you plough your way through the chapter, besides struggling with focussed sentence structures, peculiar plurals, formal and colloquial registers, unreality ending, conjugated prepositions ac ati, you can look out for your target words....
.... let's suppose you get #2, cath on the very first page of the chapter ... you get 2 points, because it was the 2nd in your list. In the next paragraph you find #11, het bigfain, and you score 11. Hah!!
That livens things up a bit and you feels quite clever when you score a hit.
You can have more words, or fewer, or just one.
You can keep a score, or not.
You can do it for a single page, or chapter by chapter, or over the whole caboodle.
So there you are .. and now, here we are with the music ... it's Jen Jeniro and "Powys"