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Comment by todd8 | Hacker News Reader

I taught myself the techniques of speed reading as a kid over 50 years ago. It didn’t really help. Fiction has too many characters and twists and turns; I can’t really read it much faster than 300 wpm or I miss something.

I’m a very fast reader of non-fiction (I have several thousand technical books). However, I don’t really read every book word for word. After reading a couple of books on algorithms for example, it’s possible to skim through the next one only looking for new subjects, better pictures, or new approaches. I also jump around and read the parts I’m interested in. The result is I have some recollection of what’s in most of my more recent books, and if I need to look something up I can often remember where I saw it in the book—like roughly how far into the text it is and where on the page it was.

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I get stuck in the middle of a lot of non-fiction works. When I started buying more non-fiction because it was 'good for me', this got particularly bad.

In fiction, the conclusion is always at the end of the book. With non-fiction you sometimes know the conclusion by chapter 4. How would you keep going if you knew who the murderer was in chapter 4 of a mystery?

For some non-fiction, authors rely on a lot of repetition, but they don't always make it clear where the next new topic will begin. In a lecture once you get it you can check out. In a video you can skip to the next one. In a book? I don't possess the right coping mechanisms for books, and I wonder if they even exist.

I'm still learning to give myself permission to stop reading a non-fiction book halfway through when I 'get it'. I have a couple shelf-feet of books in my queue because of it. I think I expect there to be some profound observations they've saved until the end, like the little scenes after the credits in movies, and like movies, the random reinforcement keeps me coming back for more.

I've tried a bit of speed reading, skimming, and only reading the first sentence of every paragraph, but it all feels like I'm short-changing myself (and then truly short-changing myself in the process).

Maybe I should just read summaries and skip these books entirely.

I make a habit of finishing everything I read, to exercise my ability to maintain focus. But that only works by being extremely selective of the material I begin, particularly books.

If a book is skimmable, why bother? Presuming the author has something genuinely interesting and substantive to say, there are often better alternatives. For example, books written by scholars are often preceded by long-form journal articles which more concisely present the material. And if you were mistaken in your belief they had something interesting to say, then you've only wasted 20 pages of your time, not 400; yet you can still say you gave them the full measure of your attention and a fair chance to persuade you.

In a lot of ways, I find myself initially trusting a tech writer whose book is 250 pages over one whose book is 400.

The courage to stop at a couple hundred pages when you've said everything that needs to be said is not something everyone has.

I think this may be one aspect of why I love 'Refactoring' and hate 'Design Patterns'. It has so much more information in a book half the size.

Would you extend your reasoning to TAOCP as well? Not trying to put you in a spot: I would, and I agree. I wonder how much of the praise devoted to TAOCP is from people who have actually read the books.

I don't think it's fair to compare 'Refactoring' and 'Design Patterns' based on their respective number of pages. They are both catalogs, but they are cataloguing different things. A design pattern IMO is harder to explain and understand than a refactoring, it needs to provide some context, and by definition you need to prove that it qualifies as a pattern by showing a few examples found "in the wild".

Also, the authors had to show how these patterns can be implemented in different programming languages (Smalltalk and C++). Fowler could get away with one simple example of a refactoring in Java each time.

Having said that, Fowler's prose is super clear, something that cannot be necessarily said about GoF, (IMO of course)...

I’ve found that the real value I get out of a nonfiction book is rarely the conclusion or any particular fact found within its pages. Instead, it’s a guide map for how to look at the sorts of things that the book is about and draw the sorts of conclusions that the author finds.

The act of reading a book permanently alters how you think a little bit, so the most important factor in deciding whether to abandon a book is whether or not you want to think more like the author does.

Like any other skill, the sort of thinking that any given book is training you to do benefits from repetition. The variation in the different scenarios also helps make this skill more robust so that you can apply it correctly to more diverse situations.

Fortunately, all this means you don’t need to make much of an effort to actually remember anything the book says— the book’s real value comes from subtlety altering the way you think which will happen so long as you’re attending to what you read. The later chapters should be easier and more relaxing to read because you’re familiar with the pattern of the author’s argument and they act more like a mental exercise than anything else.

yes, this. : )

Re: Fiction.

The really good fiction doesn't always have the conclusion at the end -- you just think that that's the conclusion. Of course this presupposes that there's a sequel that the reader is not aware of just quite yet. (The sequel may not even exist yet, but if the author's narrative extends far enough into the future then you can get that feel.)

I think a decent example of this is the Three-Body Problem, although the first one does have a sort of abrupt ending. A weaker example would be Banks' Culture novels, but that was more about there being a whole world out there -- the actual narrative did usually just end at the end of the book.

> The really good fiction doesn't always have the conclusion at the end

I was going to say that for the opposite reason -- I don't think that something being a series or part of a larger whole makes it inherently better (sometimes it hurts; many a great book has been ruined by a sequel).

Some of the best books, however, have the conclusion right at the beginning and all the rest is "how we got there". C.F. much Vonnegut.

Oh, yes, Vonnegut, source of one of my favorite ever quotes.

However, I do think the "unfinished series" idea has some merit to it.

(Pointedly avoiding the meta:)

The quote was:

> We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

Question is also, why would people speed read fiction? To pretend that they are well read and can boast thousands of books finished? I read fiction for fun, when the book is good I don't want to finish it too fast.

For technical books, I agree it is possible to skim rather quickly through stuff that I already know with speed reading approach.

> Question is also, why would people speed read fiction?

This is a question I always ask all speed readers and the answers are always so muddled. I can never understand what they are getting at.

Perhaps I relish a good novel more than most, but to me the idea of speed reading a good novel sounds about as appealing as speed drinking a fine wine.

"speed drinking a fine wine"

You may be underestimating how many people do this as well :P

Personally, I would love anything that got me thru books faster. I've been reading A Scanner Darkly for months. Admittedly it's more of a problem of concentration than reading speed, but I do understand the appeal of reading quickly. You'll simply get thru more books.

That being said - I don't understand people who listen to sped up podcasts, as I hate burning thru my favourites before a new episode is out. So I think it's just down to personal preference.

Right, I understand the bit about getting through more books, but why? There are an unreadable number of mind-blowingly brilliant novels out there and basically no reason to read any them except to enjoy oneself.

If I am enjoying a book, I can’t imagine having the urge to finish it faster. Or slower. What could possibly be gained?

Edit: also, just some unsolicited thoughts on your struggle to complete a Scanner Darkly. IIRC, A Scanner Darkly is a fairly average length novel, meaning you might expect to finish it in ~10 hours of reading. My personal experience is that it's best to enjoy a novel within a relatively limited time frame (say a couple of weeks) so that the various characters and plot lines stay fresh in your head.

If I were in your situation, I would probably question whether:

A) If I actually like the book. If you are even a quarter of the way through a book and don't like it, nothing wrong with picking up something else. As I mention above, books are for enjoyment. If you don't enjoy it, what's the point?

B) If I perhaps don't have time to read a novel now. Sure, nothing wrong with starting a movie, pausing for dinner and then finishing it afterwards. But there are limits. You wouldn't want to split a 2 hour film into a dozen ten-minute segments. And I would argue, wouldn't you want to split a 10 hour novel into a 60 ten-minute segments either. Just not a good reading experience. Nothing wrong with putting the book on hold and coming back in a few weeks once your schedule has calmed a little.

> This is a question I always ask all speed readers and the answers are always so muddled. I can never understand what they are getting at.

My business sense tells me there's a potential market for speed hearing here.

If it's anything like me (a very slow reader), I imagine speed require reduces the room for distractions to occur if you do if effectively? Like, your mental energy is very committed to the one task.

Some distractions are good!

Most of the time I vary the speed of the book as I read it. I think thats quite common (?) The last book I read had over a thousand pages, and some chapters which were not really interesting could just be skimmed without a huge loss of plot/story/detail.

Also, I can see how if you have multiple hobbies/kids/etc you'd want to speed up your reading because you have limited time.

I did this with the Wheel of Time series. I skipped the 5 middle books and had zero problems picking up the last couple and figuring out what was going on and enjoying it instead of burning out midway through the series because there were far too many side quests.

When a new WoT book would come out, I would reread the earlier ones to remind myself of where I was. After book 6, I skipped books 4 and 5 completely when doing so.

It is just a desire for time optimization. I would love to get the same satisfaction that I get from sitting and thinking deeply about every sentence of a complicated or nuanced text, in less time without loss of bandwidth. If I could read good fiction and get the same pleasure from it quicker, that would be great.

So your point seems to assume that books have a fixed volume of pleasure inside of them, which we extract by reading? In other words, the greater number of books read, the greater pleasure derived.

My own assumptions are quite different, namely I expect that like most other pleasurable activities, you get the pleasure from the time spent doing it, but that doing more of it.

For example, if two people both spend 5 hours hiking, and one person hikes 10 miles and the other 15 miles, I wouldn't then assume the latter had gotten more enjoyment from his or her hiking. Nor would I assume someone that had eaten a meal with 1000 calories got more enjoyment than someone who had merely eaten 500 calories.

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