Thread by @AgnesCallard

This is a long personal thread about my own reading practices, and a revelation I recently had about the pluses and minuses of reading at different speeds.
It might not be of interest to you.

(Photo below depicts the inhabitants of my "book" shelf)

I was just reading an academic paper at my top reading speed, it was 40 pages and I got through it in about 5 minutes. (I can go even faster for non-academic writing, though my max speed is much slower for foreign languages). But I usually don’t read that fast...

The vast majority of my reading is at slower speeds—in effect, I am constantly choosing to read more slowly than I could. Why? You might think the answer is that I absorb information better if I read slow. In fact, I believe the opposite is true...

I find that I absorb more, have a better sense of the overall structure of the argument of what I’m reading, and remember what I read better when I read fast. Faster reading is better reading. *And* it takes less time. So why not always do it?

One answer is that there's a psychological limit: I can do at most 2-3 hours of top speed reading per day before getting exhausted & needing to turn to slower reading (which I can do an indefinite amount of).
But pointing to that limit doesn't really explain things, because...

...a typical day for me is more like 1 hr fast reading, 3-6 hrs slower reading. And often I do no fast reading. Why aren't I maxing out my capacity? (Let alone taking measures to try to increase it, which I could prob. do and have never had any interest in even attempting...)

My answer had always been: I am lazy. And that consciousness of my own laziness would sit on me like a weight as I read, infusing my many, many hours of reading-too-slowly with a feeling of guilt that has become so familiar that it now forms part of the experience of reading...

But recently I've started to see it differently. I've noticed that what I don't do, when I read fast is: write notes in the margins, underline, pause to work out a line of thought on my own, come up with objections, or get reminded of a passage in another book...

Reading fast means cutting myself off every time I'm tempted to take something in the text and run with it. An hour of reading fast involves a hundred moments of self-disciplining, during which I tell myself, over & over again: "Stop talking! Now is the time for you to listen!"--

--and this is painful for me. It's really hard to shut down my own thinking completely to make room for someone else's. It makes sense that I am better at capturing their thoughts when I do this, but I can only do it for so long before I need to come up for air...

The problem is not that I'm lazy, but that I'm selfish.
Somehow, I find this reassuring.
Fin.