Recently, a category romance author was quoted as saying her book was a good “bathtub read”, as if it could be finished, not just in one sitting, but in one bathing! Me? I need three days to read a category romance.

I read slowly. Very slowly. I know this comes in large part from habits developed reading and teaching philosophy over the past many years.

The connection between philosophy and slow reading is not just personal: some, citing the following passage, credit Nietzsche with kicking off the “slow reading” movement in the modern era (and yes, “modern” to philosophers is anything from Descartes on):

Besides, we are friends of the lento, I and my book. I have not been a philologist in vain — perhaps I am one yet: a teacher of slow reading. I even come to write slowly. At present it is not only my habit, but even my taste — a perverted taste, maybe — to write nothing but what will drive to despair every one who is ‘in a hurry.’ For philology is that venerable art which exacts from its followers one thing above all — to step to one side, to leave themselves spare moments, to grow silent, to become slow — the leisurely art of the goldsmith applied to language: an art which must carry out slow, fine work, and attains nothing if not lento.

Thus philology is now more desirable than ever before; thus it is the highest attraction and incitement in an age of ‘work’: that is, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-skurry, which is so eager to ‘get things done’ at once, even every book, whether old or new. Philology itself, perhaps, will not so hurriedly ‘get things done.’ It teaches how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar, with delicate fingers and eyes. My patient friends, this book appeals only to perfect readers and philologists: learn to read me well!

–”Nietzsche on Slow Reading”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/22/08. The passage is from Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, p. 5 in the Maudmarie Clark edition (1886)

Isn’t that a great passage? I think what Nietzsche says about philology is, or can be, true of fiction as well. At least it is for me.

Educators from preschool to the graduate level have been rethinking our attitude to reading. They are wondering if speed is a good indicator of fluency after all. Is accelerated reading always better?

In departments of education, professors talk about the “fluency” that those who are learning to read need to achieve to become good readers. Unless one can digest the letters on the page fast enough, one cannot comprehend what one is reading. But once one learns how to read, there is a speed beyond which one stops reading in a truly effective way. I am convinced that most speed reading is impaired reading, just like the sort you do when you have a fever or are tired or engaged in other tasks at the same time you are supposed to be reading. Unless you are very smart, speed-reading forces you to ignore all but one dimension of a literary work, the simplest information. What we lose is the enjoyment that made people turn to literature in the first place.

The role of literature is to mess with time, to establish its own time, its own rhythm. A new agenda for literary studies should open up the time of reading, just as it opens up how the writer establishes his or her rhythm. Instead of rushing by works so fast that we don’t even muss up our hair, we should tarry, attend to the sensuousness of reading, allow ourselves to enter the experience of words.

– Lindsay Waters, Time for Reading, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 9, 2007, Vol. 53 Issue 23, Special Section pB6-B8

I don’t know if speed reading is “impaired reading” for others. It definitely is for me.

I am truly amazed at how many books romance readers can read at a time, in a week, even in a day. Romance readers are often referred to as “ravenous” or “rabid”, and while one part of me wonders if those adjectives come from a subconscious worry about women deriving personal pleasure in anything (got to keep women’s sexuality in check), I also ask myself if there is any other genre so well known for voluminous reading.

I can get overwhelmed, especially hanging out on Twitter, by how many books there are, and by how fast my peers in Romanceland seem to get through them. Purchases of books have become a kind of coping strategy for me. At this point, given my reading speed, I think I have purchased my total allotment of books for my mortal life!

[As I was putting the finishing touches on this post a new itouch/iphone romance novel app was announced by Smart Bitches/Dear Author, a TBR app. Considering I am already overwhelmed by my TBR, I think I would do better with a "Don't Buy Any More Books" app. Is there one of those?]

Another habit that many folks in Romanceland have is reading in “snatches”. On Twitter, I saw a picture of a book open on a table in a crowded bar, and thought to myself, “I would never try to read at a bar”. I tend not to read unless I know I can be undisturbed for a stretch of time.

I also love audio books, and it wasn’t until I started looking into the “slow reading” movement (and, yes, it is connected to “slow food” and similar movements that emphasize locality, community, uniqueness, and pleasure over commercial culture, cost saving, and convenience. That means there is an anti-digital aspect to it, unfortunately) that I understood one of the attractions of the spoken word book:

In a classic study of the psychology of reading, Edmund Huey (1921) claimed that oral reading had a ceiling of about four words per second, whereas silent readers could process texts at two or three times that rate—with no diminishment of comprehension. It was time, he argued, for reading to go silent. Lip readers and subvocalizers (like me) were viewed as too stubbornly tied to the sound of words, too limited by the inefficient mechanisms of breath and speech. Huey did claim that silent readers retained a form of inner speech with traces of sound awareness, but at the higher and more efficient speed of reading, readers only sampled sounds— the train was moving too fast.

–Newkirk, Thomas, “The Case for Slow Reading”, Educational Leadership; Mar 2010, Vol. 67 Issue 6, p6-11

Being a slow reader, audio works for me. A category is about 6 hours on audio. That’s not much longer than I would spend reading it.

One of the things that many people in Romanceland do is reread, and rereading is something the “slow reading” advocates … advocate. I was at a thesis defense with 5 English professors last week (on sensation novels of the nineteenth century), and when I mentioned that I never reread, they gasped in unison. My admission literally brought the defense to a full stop. I think rereading would fit nicely with my slow reading style, and keep meaning to do more of it. But I need to get off my own back about “catching up” first.

I’m not trying to tell anyone else how to read. If anything, I’m reminding myself that it’s ok to be a tortoise among the hares. I sometimes wish I could read more, and faster, and still read the way I want to, so that I could join in more conversations and make more genre connections, and not feel like I am so far behind. But that’s not going to happen.

To emphasize that last point, I’ll end with a quote about individual reading styles as not just a matter of personal preference, but as a vital cornerstone of democracy:

And we are active about the process. We are in charge of the time, for example. We can choose when to read; we don’t have to wait for a timetabled opportunity to open the covers; we can read in the middle of the night, or over breakfast, or during a long summer’s evening. And we’re in charge of the place where the reading happens; we’re not anchored to a piece of unwieldy technology, or required to be present in a particular building along with several hundred other people. We can read in bed, or at the bus stop, or (as I used to do when I was younger and more agile) up a tree.

Nor do we have to read it in a way determined by someone else. We can skim, or we can read it slowly; we can read every word, or we can skip long passages; we can read it in the order in which it presents itself, or we can read it in any order we please; we can look at the last page first, or decide to wait for it; we can put the book down and reflect, or we can go to the library and check what it claims to be fact against another authority; we can assent, or we can disagree.

So our relationship with books is a profoundly, intensely, essentially democratic one. It places demands on the reader, because that is the nature of a democracy: citizens have to play their part. If we don’t bring our own best qualities to the encounter, we will bring little away. Furthermore, it isn’t static: there is no final, unquestionable, unchanging authority. It’s dynamic. It changes and develops as our understanding grows, as our experience of reading – and of life itself -increases.

–Phillip Pullman, The Guardian, The War on Words, Saturday 6 November 2004

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