How to read

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

I would recommend the opposite; learn to speed read. Comprehension tends to go up as reading time decreases and it makes re-reads much easier which is usually when you begin picking up on subtext.

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Sorry about taking so long to respond but I had to go to work. Baby needs new shoes.

You have a good point and now that I think about it, there’s some stuff I like to read fast too - stuff like the back of tooth-paste tubes, instruction manuals, product safety warnings, and business contracts. Artsy-fartsy literature, on the other hand, I like to read slowly. I like to throttle-back and enjoy the ride, stop to ponder what I’ve just read, try to circle around and come at it from a different angle, spend some time enjoying a particularly well-crafted sentence.

So here’s where I make a crude simile:
Reading is like sex. Fast is good, but slow is better.

And here’s where I recall a crude, anthropomorphic joke:
An old bull and a young bull are standing on a hill, watching the herd. The young bull, sniffing and fetching and full of anxiety, says to the old bull, “Hey man, I’ve got a great idea. Let’s run down this hill and f*** one of those cows.” The old bull says the young bull, “Naw man, let’s walk down this hill and f*** ‘em all.”

When you speed read there's no rule that says you can't slow down for particularly good passages or even go back and read them and soak up the phonetic/aesthetic detail. But reading takes time; a lot of time compared to most of the other arts. Most people read at a rate that makes reading frustrating to them. When you read one word at a time like you speak then you're reading at about 250 words per minute. That means for an even average size book of around 400 pages it would take about 10 hours to read. Imagine being able to cut that time in half (which is easy with speed reading), then you'd be able to read the book twice in the same time. Imagine being able to read that same book in a day; think of how much MORE you could get read! There is so much great literature out there; so much that's worth reading. And outside of literature there are so many films, so much music, and so much of the rest of life to experience. If you can save many hours reading and experience more in less time I just don't think this is ever a bad thing. We may never be able to breeze through books like Harold Bloom, but it would be nice to get close.

Yes, I realize that things like poetry or extremely complex prose are either impossible to speed read or that speed reading ruins the effect, but this only accounts for a small-ish amount of literature out there.

Ah-hah! So I’ve learned that speed-reading is not the same thing as fast-reading and I’m willing to concede that it may be an effective technique for some readers, but I’m not willing to say it’s for everybody. I’ll admit my prejudice here and make the excuse that those old Evelyn Wood TV commercials, with a reader zigzagging his finger across the page at lightning speed, seemed like a hoax to me – something in the same category as baldness cures or this-will-get-you-into-that-bikini-in-two-weeks-guaranteed programs.

Anyway, it may have more to do with the temperament of the reader than with the method. That is to say, I don’t think you can rank order these things like college football teams.

Okay, so I’m trying to think of an allegory. Hmmm, something less crass than two bulls on a hill but probably not as well thought out as the Allegory of the Cave. Here goes: This how-to-read dilemma may be analogous to choosing an adult language program. You can go with an audio program like Pimsleur’s, or a mostly visual program like Rosetta Stone, or you can take night classes at the local community college, or you can hook-up with a [your desired language here] girlfriend. There are people who will swear that one or another of these methods is the best or even the only way to learn a language. I think it really just comes down to the person.

Well, enough of all that. What do you guys think of boozing when you read? I find that a couple of high-balls works pretty good when I’m reading someone like Hemingway or Hunter S. Thompson, but not so much when I’m reading someone like Henry James.

I think alcohol of the heavier kind like wine or schnapps or Belgian beer, ruins the concentration. It depends, like you said, on what you are reading, but Shakespeare with a glass of wine... I'd be surprised that by the end of the glass I was still concentrated and was just reading the words and not taking them in ... :lol:

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Originally Posted by Sancho

I’ll admit my prejudice here and make the excuse that those old Evelyn Wood TV commercials, with a reader zigzagging his finger across the page at lightning speed, seemed like a hoax to me – something in the same category as baldness cures or this-will-get-you-into-that-bikini-in-two-weeks-guaranteed programs.

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It's not a hoax in the least bit. The problem has to do that people are taught to read one word at a time and yet our brain is a powerful enough processor that we can read MUCH more than one word at a time. For instance, look at (don't read), this phrase:

How many words can you see just by looking at it?

Were you able to look at it without reading it? Probably not, because we read by SIGHT and recognize the word long before we say the word sub-vocally. If you can cut out that sub-vocalizing or minimize it you can read as many words as you can see. How many words could you see at a time in that line? It's undoubtedly more than one. In fact, it's impossible just to see one word. So imagine if you can read 4-5 words during each eye fixation? All of a sudden you've just doubled (at least) your reading time.

I honestly do think speed reading is for everyone. I've only just gotten into it and it's already made a major difference in how fast I can get through books and even online message boards.

In fact all I do is I kind of choose a particular book depending upon my moods. If I feel buoyant and cheery I read serious books like Dostoevsky and if I am not in a proper mood or feeling bored I choose to read lighter kinds and at times I read Arabian nights and they are really interesting stories and that take me to a different world wherein different values, traditions, systems exist and in fact they are light stories but they are not light philosophically. In fact reading is like living to me and now I am drunk with books and living without books is almost unthinkable to me and in essence books rejuvenate me.

In fact books are the reservoirs thru which I kind of inundate myself with and everyday books renew me and energize me wholly. Reading style and methods are not learned but they go naturally

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Originally Posted by blazeofglory

In fact all I do is I kind of choose a particular book depending upon my moods. If I feel buoyant and cheery I read serious books like Dostoevsky and if I am not in a proper mood or feeling bored I choose to read lighter kinds and at times I read Arabian nights and they are really interesting stories and that take me to a different world wherein different values, traditions, systems exist and in fact they are light stories but they are not light philosophically. In fact reading is like living to me and now I am drunk with books and living without books is almost unthinkable to me and in essence books rejuvenate me.

In fact books are the reservoirs thru which I kind of inundate myself with and everyday books renew me and energize me wholly. Reading style and methods are not learned but they go naturally

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I fell upon your post here a bit by chance - while I am myself re-reading Proust's short text "On Reading" where he describes how reading is his absolute need and his life breath... a little as you say; it is for him a sort of communication with his own solitude, or rather - within his solitude, spicing his mind with the beginings of new perspectives where the author's are ending... This gem of a text is a praise of reading, preparing much to how to read (but this is perhaps my personal feeling only) his A la Recherche du Temps Perdu... I thought that might be interesting for you, so here it is, shared. And thanks for your sharing as well. Bar

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Originally Posted by kiki1982

It depends, like you said, on what you are reading, but Shakespeare with a glass of wine... I'd be surprised that by the end of the glass I was still concentrated and was just reading the words and not taking them in ... :lol:

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I know exactly what you mean. I had a similar experience last summer while reading an account of 16th century Spanish Exploradors in the Americas. I was sitting on my back porch, enjoying a tall-cool one, and burning one of Uncle Fidel’s Torpedos, when I got to the bottom of a page and realized I had no clue what I’d just read. So I read it again. No luck. So I snubbed out the cigar, went inside, poured another tall one, and flipped on the TV.

Hey, last night I found a good book on reading after chatting with MorpheusSandman about speed-reading: Reading Like a Writer, a guide for people who love books and for those who want to write them, by Francine Prose; Harper Perennial, 2007. I’ve been reading her short subjects in magazines like Harpers for years. To me she is one of the most readable writers still writing. Here’s an excerpt from page three:

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As I wrote, I discovered that writing, like reading, was done one word at a time, one punctuation mark at a time. It required what a friend calls “putting every word on trial for its life”: changing an adjective, cutting a phrase, removing a comma, and putting the comma back in.

I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision the writer had made.

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I found thinking "What purpose does this (insert literary mechanism here) serve?" as useful. One teacher always harped that, "Authors don't do things on accident; they do them on purpose." While taking that adage as a way to analyze literature may be limited, it's helpful nonetheless.

"I will, myself, admit that appreciation of my work is improved by drink."
- William Shakespeare to his friend Richard Burbage in a letter, now in the Stratford Corp. archives

In my experience everthing in reading comes through practice. Back in the day when I actually read it were the previous readings that made the one author's became more legible. I woudn't understand some books of philosophy if I hadn't already read, though and discussed some other pontual ideas and problems, even in the internet. Simple stuff that made my comprehension of a topic raise little by little. That is about the ideas. About gramatical complexity, it were the struggle to understand progressively more difficult authors that gave me the capacity to understand others.