Conversely, a lot of fiction, especially fiction on the lighter side, tends to repeat itself, or provide more narrative clues as to what's going on, so you can usually pick up what you missed in the context.
Of course, that's a really high level recollection of something I'm not an expert in :P
I also might just be trying to convince myself that I'm not a slow reader, heh
If anyone has any research or info to the contrary, I'd love to hear about it, because I'd definitely like to be able to absorb meaningful/dense information more quickly, even if it were just a small percent increase.
I'd also really like to see some third party research/tests with stuff like this and spreeder
Then go back and read your notations (just put ticks or dots by the stuff that's important in the margins). And now you understand it and you can summarize it in the notes. And this cements the learning.
Of course this is a lot of work. I'd rather slam it once, brain index it and maybe come back if I care.
I think that happens to me when I do "decompressing," where I'm reading a book to unwind my brain after having read nothing but papers or technical books for a few weeks.
Other times I'm just in the mood to sit down and really experience what the book has to offer. When I'm in that mood, I don't want to sacrifice really taking the time to let a book evoke imagery and mood, in the name of speed. I guess some folks can get that reading a lot faster, but I can't right now.
It was my introduction to Heinlein. I'd avoided older scifi because I'd wondered whether I would relate to it, and felt confirmed in that suspicion with Stranger. It's not that I'm not glad that I read it, and if I consider the context that it was written in circa the 1950s, then I can definitely appreciate how radical it must have been. But to my sensibilities, it feels tawdry and cheap, and thus insincere. It's in no way a fair criticism since it seems to have been part of the zeitgeist that led to the free love of the 60s and subsequent over-indulgence and exploitation of the 70s (and thus the dominance of the idea that sex sells and so on). And from what I gather it was rather sincere in so far as Heinlein was supremely interested in challenging prevailing mores of the time. But outside of that context, to me, it feels, again, cheap and tawdry, and just kind of stale.
It's the kind of book where I think I can intellectually appreciate it's contribution and what it was in the context it was born out of, but I'm not really super interested in reading more like it.