I recently read a comment about reading Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear that suggested or advised readers to ‘read it fast – straight through’. And it was good advice, but the book itself pulled me through it rather fast.

I find I calibrate my reading speed to what it is that I’m reading. After having finished Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear and re-visiting sections, I found I wanted, badly, to slow down and I turned immediately back to Proust and Remembrance … – that really slows me down and I am encouraged to savor and loll along.

Often, I find myself wanting to get on to something else whenever I’m reading. Just impatient.

My father enrolled me in a speed reading course at the local community college the summer before my freshman year. I don’t know that I consciously used any of those techniques – I feel sure I did in some of my courses and in the text books – finding the salient parts, identifying the points necessary. But I don’t think a distinction was made in the speed reading class. Rather, what I have done is apply it to different fields. I know in literature or fiction reading, I do not want to read fast.

I am interested in what the ‘electronical-ization’ of reading is doing to me. I find I must make myself slow down – like in reading this post and the replies – I wanted to take it in. I tend to fly through things online and find myself all worked up and scattered at the end of a session online – which I don’t find comfortable or helpful. I must be more conscious of this and be more purposeful in my approach.

Also, I am interested in how ‘speeded-up’ our current times feel. The message I get from work, from culture is to ‘be faster’. I find I, like Nietzsche, want to slow it down.

I’ve had an interesting time recently reading three books in particular in the following order – Brooklyn (Toibin), Your Face Tomorrow (Marias), and Proust – the speed has been (somewhat) dictated by the writing itself. And that seems to be the case to me. I do want to slow down, for I feel that makes the experience more rewarding and enjoyable.

Thanks for the post, for the comments, and to Mark Athitakis’ American Fiction Notes for leading me here…

After I did my oral/comprehensive exams in graduate school, which required an unprecedented bulk and speed of reading, I found I couldn’t read for pleasure for about six months afterward. In fact, it is only in the last couple of years (a half decade or so after these exams) that I have begun reading “voraciously” again.

BTW slow writing angst is also bad. Twitter gave me that!

I can’t slow down my reading-have tried, it doesn’t work, and I’m too impatient anyway.

As to reading slower? Heh…well, look at this way. You’re savoring the books and I’m over here in my corner stewing because I’m already done.

I think it’s more a matter of how one interprets the symbols on the page: by sound or by shape. Best example (since it was the first instance ever, in a story, where someone’s approach matched mine) was when Anne in Anne of Green Gables insists that her name is “Anne with an E”, with an explanation that it “looks” more finished that way. I totally got that. Ann, lacking the -e, has an incomplete shape to my eyes — but if you read for sound, then it probably doesn’t matter, really, because “Anne” sounds exactly the same as “Ann”. And you might like the word “susurrus” for the way it sounds like what it means, while I find the word annoying because of the repetition of s+u and the way the double-r looks odd in the middle.

And, too, that sound-readers are going to get more out of alliteration and onomatopoeia, while reading as fast as I do means the first consonant is subsumed inside the overall ‘shape’ of the word, so something like “wise words wait” doesn’t say “repeated sounds” because the shape is different, thanks to the w+i not looking like the w+o followed by upright of the d, and so on.

Yet I find marvelous enjoyment from reading when I find authors whose style seems to match my read-for-shape preference, using unexpected words that read just right because they “look” right. Some authors are meant to be read out loud. Some aren’t. At least, IMO.

Then again, I get frustrated way too fast with audiobooks, because the speaking speed is about one-fifth my comprehension/reading speed. I end up wanting to kick the audio to get it to speed up.

Lastly: ‘ravenous’ doesn’t just seem to apply to romance readers. It seems to be an adjective for readers that only gets applied to women. I can’t recall the last time anyone described a male reader as ‘ravenous’ or ‘rabid’, even when the man in question was a three-book-daily reader.

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 think you are right about a cultural fear of women’s appetites, but I also wonder if supply is influencing demand here. So much romance is published that a romance reader is like a kid in a candy store.

I read fast, and often have a couple of books on the go. I had a TBR pile before I started reading romance (just not a name for it), but all of those things have been exacerbated by reading romance, both because the books tend to be cheaper than other things I read and because there are so many out there that tempt me.

The idea of dangerous appetites appeals to me because there is, for me, an addictive quality to my fastest, less attentive reading. Like binge eating, I zoom through books and buy more when I’m having a tough time, to keep me from thinking. I pile up a TBR because I don’t want to run out. I feel guilty about these habits.

But then, I’m also an English prof who slow reads and re-reads and tries to get my students to see what you catch when you slow down. You must re-read philosophy texts you’re teaching and writing on. (I’m not sure where those English people got off gasping at you.)

You are going to post more on your ethical criticism paper, aren’t you? I’m looking forward to that (and I have a question for a romance-reading moral philosopher).

Now the Susan Hill quote – let me say that I’ve read the whole passage that that comes from before and uh, yeah, I still find it snotty.
She infers that you can only skim at speed – I contend that actually, cadence, and the sub-concious effects of word choices only really be felt when you read at pace, whatever pace is for you. That point where the words flow through your mind and the external ceases to exist. That state when the words curl into the ego space in the back of your head and drag out honest, unconsidered responses – that’s as valuable to me as any considered analysis.
Not that I don’t do that too – I go back and look word by word and work out exactly what it is in the word choice and pacing that triggers that response – but I wouldn’t have anything to analyse if I didn’t let the story do what it does first.
I have more to say but I’m seriously fried. Will see if I can articulate it better in the morning!