Humble eBook Bundle 2

http://thoughtcatalog.com/2013/how-to-read-more-a-lot-more/

The novels I'm talking about are about 300 pages in paperback. The reading level is not Peanuts, but it's also not Shakespeare.

By comparison, I read the World War Z book over the course of about a week, in bits. I found it very boring and wooden though. Motivation makes a big difference.

I know I've been down the same road before, learning how to speed read and all that without actually getting any satisfying comprehension. Though, I would rarely get any satisfying comprehension at normal or slower reading speeds either, cause my mind would just doze off to sleep after about a page or two. Something about the internal conversion of written symbols to language has always been a bit of a bottleneck for me (and I'm not dyslexic), but it took me a while to put my finger on what it was that made reading such a chore for me, since I have always loved learning and absorbing information in other ways (I.e. talks/lectures). It didn't really click for me what the problem was until I started giving audiobooks a chance. It may seem weird, but prior to that, I had always felt like resorting to audio would be a bit like cheating, and would somehow make my experience of the material less 'genuine' than someone who could pick it up directly from the original source. Not to mention that speed reading seemed a lot faster/efficient than having somebody read to you.

Luckily, I got over that and realized that I could actually retain a miraculous about of information even when listening at 3x normal speeds, making my whole experience of the material a lot more vivid. Now I 'read' like a book or two a week using text-to-speech on my phone, and it's pretty awesome.

In retrospect, it's kinda funny cause I've always had auditory inclinations, like the fact that I had been a musician for almost 10 years when I realized that I'm not much of a visual learner.