hats off #1: slow reading
Reading fast doesn’t mean reading well. I get much more out of books when I take my time.
Big readers are usually fast readers, but that’s never been the case for me. I probably average about two minutes per page, although I’m generally a bit quicker with novels than non-fiction. Anything much faster than that and I find myself skipping over words or phrases or just not taking much in.
I’ve always been like this. I thought I would speed up as I got older but it never really happened. You hear about these brilliant people who read a short novel in a single sitting or a long one over a weekend. They somehow get through a hundred books a year even though you never see them reading. They can knock off fifty pages in bed between the end of Newsnight and turning off the light. Damn their eyes. I just can’t do that.
Faster is better?
I often worried about this and thought there was something wrong with me. After all, when we like something and do it a lot we expect to get better at it. And ‘better’ usually means ‘faster’. Why was I so easily distracted and so slow to take in information? Maybe I was dyslexic (I wasn’t). Or was there something wrong with my eyes? (As it happens, there was, but being short-sighted is, if anything, an advantage when it comes to reading books, although definitely not for reading a blackboard at the other end of the room.)
About thirty years ago, a colleague lent me a speed reading course. This came in a box with some cassettes (younger readers click here) and a little instruction booklet. An enthusiastic American narrator banged on about superfast readers like John F Kennedy, who could take in whole paragraphs at a single glance the way the rest of us take in a picture. This just seemed like an unattainable superpower. But most of the course was about using your finger to follow the words as you read, and then doing it faster and faster. The idea was that when your eye wanders, your mind wanders, and this was a way of keeping yourself focused on the words in front of you and nothing else.
You might sometimes see people doing this in cafés or meetings, their fingers flying across the page as if they’re repeatedly trying to sweep away a stubborn speck of dust. I tried it quite diligently — always in private; let’s face it, it looks a bit weird — and while it did improve my concentration slightly, it didn’t do much for my speed. As soon as I started to go faster, I became so mesmerised by what my finger was doing that I actually stopped ‘reading’ at all. I still do the finger thing sometimes as a way avoiding distractions or if I’m trying to follow a particularly difficult passage, but just at my normal reading pace.
Distraction and day dreaming
I’ve now learned to accept being a slow reader. It’s part of who I am. I take in information slowly. I reflect on it. What I thought of as ‘distraction’ was often just me seeing connections between things or using my imagination in a way that wouldn’t be possible with tightly focused reading all the time. And who’s to say that distraction and day dreaming isn’t part of the reading experience? It’s one of life's great pleasures to be able to savour the feelings and insight that come from what you’re reading, rather than just internalising the information on the page. We can leave that sort of thing to AI.
On the rare occasions when I read a book really quickly — say over a long weekend — I find it unsatisfying, and often a week or two later I can’t remember much about it. It all goes by too quickly. I like to spend time with a book, observing how it relates to other things I’m reading, watching or doing, so it has a place in my life.
Getting over my slow reader stigma also let me throw out my long standing prejudice against reading more than one book at a time. I used to worry that it would slow me down even further and that my apparently slow brain would struggle to keep track of several different narratives. Until it dawned on me that I had no trouble keeping up with Coronation Street, EastEnders and several other TV series all at the same time.
Not caring how long it takes me to get through books means I can now have several on the go at the same time — generally a novel, a non-fiction book and something in my second language, French — while also dipping into others when I feel like it. They go at different speeds, so the combinations are always changing. I also read yet another book with my French teacher during our weekly lessons. If you think I read slowly in English, you should see me read in French — we’ve been working through Julia March’s La Fille Pas Sympa (‘The Unlikable Girl’), a page or two at a time, for over two years. But, as I said, I don’t care about that anymore.
Reading as experience
The first time I read James Joyce’s famously difficult classic, Ulysses, around 1990, it took me about five months. It’s a tough book, but even I could probably have read it quicker. But now I’m glad I didn’t. Pausing along the way to explore Joyce’s often obscure references, reading some bits (like Molly Bloom’s 22,000-word monologue at the end) aloud because its the only way they make any sense, puzzling over some passages before giving up in confusion — this was all part of the fun. I’ve never forgotten that experience, because it was just that: an experience1.
I spent a good chunk of my thirties reading Marcel Proust’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (‘In Search of Lost Time’) – all 2,800 pages and seven volumes of it (in English translation; even I have my limits). Towards the end, the narrator goes into deeply reflective mode, recalling the events of his life and the people he’s known, and being — let’s be frank — quite maudlin about the passage of time and how it can’t be stopped (but very eloquently of course). It’s strangely uplifting, even though you can feel the presence of Proust’s own imminent death right there in the pages 2.
It had an almost narcotic effect on me, inducing an emotion I can only describe as ‘euphoric melancholy’. That trance-like feeling lasted for several days and was as much a product of my own imagination as of Marcel’s. I still feel it now from time to time. I don’t think I’d have got that skipping through Proust at two pages a minute. 📚
I’d sped up by the time I re-read Ulysses a few years ago — it only took me four months. This was partly because I insisted on listening to the relevant episode of RTE’s excellent podcast series ‘Reading Ulysses’ before diving into each of Joyce’s 18 chapters. It’s probably worth listening to this series even if you can’t be bothered to read the book (the series also includes a re-issue of RTE’s 1982 radio dramatisation of Ulysses). It’s wry, funny and, considering it’s two professor-types discussing the great classic of Irish literature, remarkably unpretentious and irreverent.
Proust died in 1922, leaving the last three volumes of À la Recherche in draft form. These were edited for publication by Marcel’s brother, Robert. The final volume, Le Temps Retrouvé (‘Time Regained’) wasn’t published until 1927.