I don't do any of the tricky stuff that 'speed readers' do.
The only thing I'm aware is different is I don't hear the words in my head when I read as I'm often 'reading' a chunk of 3-4 words at once.
I thought this was completely normal til I spoke to an ex about it when she commented I demolished books.
I love Philosophy and classic literature and I've yet to meet anyone that's managed to speed read Proust's "In Search of Lost Time", and then tell give me a detailed description of the plot, themes, artistic merit, and so on. Similarly with books like Ulysses. There's no possible way to speed read that book because it's so rich with allusions, references to religion, art, mythology, and philosophy. If you tried to "speed read" it, you would be missing half the point of reading it in the first place.
Reading great books isn't about numbers, you don't get rewarded for how many classics you read in a year. Reading great books is about slowly absorbing all the riches inside, something that just cannot happen if you're rushing. I've read The Brothers Karamazov and The Magic Mountain 4 or 5 times and each time I learn something new and gain a deeper understanding of psychology and life. I find it more rewarding to read and re-read the classics slowly, writing notes, using a critical guide (or book of companion essays), than smashing through as many crappy novels or modern popular non-fiction books (The Power of Now of any of Malcom Gladwells books are typical fodder for todays readers).
I too dismiss things that people enjoy as "crap" because I have such a gigantic brain from reading philosophy and looking down everyone else, and belittle them for believing that they read and understand fast in the wrong type of book.
I'm trying to rally against the crowd you always find in any thread on speed-reading who love to talk about how great they are for reading 10 books a day and gaining nothing from it.
One authors view - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/07/howard-jacobso...
Edit: And I like all of the above books/authors
Some books are quick to read, others slow. Ulysses was intentionally written to be difficult and Stephen King put great effort in making his books easy to read.
I think the reason some folks get defensive on this topic is that it's somewhat common for someone to claim to be an incredibly fast reader, but on closer inspection it is (almost always) revealed that they are reading very straightforward and simple fiction that is about as close to being designed for speed reading as possible. This makes the claim of speed reading feel disingenuous. There can be truly dramatic differences between novels in terms of the complexity of the language used and the nuance of characters and events. I don't think one should expect a particularly celebratory response if one is making other folks feel like slow readers when they actually have been reading far more complicated material.
Or just one that tells it like it is.
Not everything is of the same level (e.g. Bach and Nicky Minaj or Coltrane and Vanilla Ice), and not everything is equally "subjective". The same that goes for music, goes for literature, cinema, and so on.
Sure, USA was founded on a populist ideology, where no individual's tastes and cultural development is lesser than another's. Well, not all cultures agree with that.
>I too dismiss things that people enjoy as "crap" because I have such a gigantic brain from reading philosophy and looking down everyone else, and belittle them for believing that they read and understand fast in the wrong type of book.
Well, at some point someone has to belittle if not the people, surely the wrong type of book -- in other words, put it in perspective, not everything is a diamond -- else there's no art and no culture, just an indistinguishable blob of different works.
So I switched the extra processing power to making context-appropriate inflections, dramatizations, and intonations instead of the monotone my classmates were doing, which the teachers seemed to tolerate.
I do this too, and other people often comment on how well I read out loud.
I often find myself buffering words into vocalization while I read ahead a line or so and prepare the next sentence. I can insert pauses (or intone a clause as an aside) to make it easier for the listener to parse.
What tricks do you have?
The catch is that if I am thinking about something else simultaneously then what I am reading aloud doesn’t make it into memory; I can read for 20 minutes and then suddenly realize that I have no idea what happened in the story. The reading is on autopilot.
Your teacher probably tolerated monotone because your classmates were working hard just to get the words out, and they weren't ready to add inflection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjtPMiumixA Don't Read Like a Robot - Blazer Fresh | GoNoodle
It was stated that the only thing she inspired me to do was slow down my expression of reading speed. Reading faster than my peers and entertaining them is not something people get embarrassed about.
Her telling me to slow down was not a magical way to get me to add inflection out of the void. Being scolded for deviating from normal speed only reinforced the standard school mentality that any deviation = bad. It would have only discouraged me from adding inflections without first being instructed to do so.
>(other classmates) weren't ready to add inflection.
I don't recall my classmates even adding inflection by high school or beyond, let alone by the end of the trimester. At least where I'm from, elementary teachers do not try to add inflection in their students. I'd imagine being able to read itself is more than sufficient to send them on to the next class.
Teachers focusing attention on illiterate students probably took precedence over tinkering with subjective inflections in kids who were not only going to pass their K-5 standardized tests but were already reading at a high school level.
This is why my kids go to private school and I support school choice: when students are treated like widgets that only have to meet some minimum quality standard, that necessarily results in teachers doing exactly as you describe: tolerating mediocrity because mediocrity is the standard. It’s not the teachers’ fault, it’s the way public schools are designed: to output students at a minimum level of competency. Until parents start demanding something beyond the minimum and voting accordingly, just “passing,” is all that we can expect.
I fall in the “not” category (the average-sized book is a 3-4 hour length for me), but I will occasionally intentionally subvocalize, just to slow myself down a bit.
Can on learn not to subvocalize?
This is what I do, though sometimes it's a second pass over a passage that I want to savor or really focus deeply on.
I've read all of the Discworld novels at least 3 times and a few like Hogfather more than a dozen (I re-read it ever Christmas).
Reading is one of lives truly great pleasures and it's one of lifes most democratic.
I've wondered if this is one of those thing that if you have not learned how to do it before a certain age, your brain can no longer learn it, like seeing in stereo etc...
Once I found books and authors I liked I became a voracious reader, from eight to adulthood it wasn't unusual for me to have 3-4 books on the go at once and to read 3-4 books in a week all the classic works of sci-fi, books on science, computers, geography, history, politics, biology I was a sponge, I'd read almost anything - I used to read while walking to and from school, I walked into surprisingly few lamp posts.
The more I read the less I vocalised the words in my head, I started with pointing at each word (as most kids do) and then I stopped doing that, then I started looking at the word shape rather than the word and not vocalising it at all, it wasn't anything conscious just a natural progression.
In a very profound sense that teacher and my mum altered the scope of my life for the next 30 years, the teacher by realising I just needed the time and the right material and my mum for scouring charity shops/2nd hand book shops to keep me fed with books as money was tight (bless her, she used to keep a list in her purse of all the authors I liked, what books they had written and which I'd read).
That IS the tricky stuff speed readers do.
That and people over-estimate my intelligence because I know about lots of random things, they think I'm smart because of that but they could have done exactly the same thing if they'd chosen to which feeds nicely into nature vs nurture I guess.
I got hooked on books and my mum fed that addiction, that they didn't is the only difference.
It helps that the perception of computer programmers is that we are geeky but do something that is incredibly difficult (when I know the reality is except for certain domains, you really don't need much math beyond arithmetic and the rest is conscientious attention to detail and explaining the problem simply to a really high speed idiot).