Back in University when I took a philosophy course, my professor talked about reading. He mentioned a student who proudly announced that he read Plato’s Republic in 2 hours. He said “you call that reading?”
I just spent an hour reading this one paragraph.
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Reminding me of when I used to read 3 books a day. Didn’t get eye strain off it as my mother used to warn (library book text didn’t require a magnifying glass to read).
Some works are too dreary to read at pace: Gormenghast; War and Peace, A Room with a View, Ulysses. Some might call it savouring but there’s a difference between those and the likes of, say Aristotle’s Poetics, or Plato’s The Republic.
What are you trying to say? Do you have anything to say?
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I read at the same pace if it is out loud or to myself, because I still read all the words out loud silently in my mind. It made classes like history or English a pain because of the speed I read at. However I read technical books at roughly the same speed as fiction…
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I tried listening to a few as audiobooks. I was driven crazy by the dialog, or rather, by the words “he said” and “she said”.
I love the short and snappy dialog as read, not so much as spoken.
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Given that the vast majority of the things we do are a bad idea, holistically speaking, I find the slacker ethos vastly underrated.
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I have a feeling that Robert G Barrett would fare pretty well on that score.
Bit of a tangent:
I find that I can improve my skills in a foreign language by combining book and audio book. In other words, I listen to the audio book while reading the same book. So I read the words and hear how they are pronounced.
Possibly not the best method to start learning a new language, but a good way to familiarize oneself with one after having aquired the basics.
As posted above, it should be a good audio version, read by a competent (voice) actress/actor. It should also be a book you enjoy reading, something you want to read.
If you try this method for the first time it helps choosing a book you’ve already read in your first language. That way you can concentrate on picking up the language as you already know the plot etc.
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Good point. I do vary that when I read it aloud. I have a strong suspicion that Parker wrote the dialogue without any attribution, and the editors insisted that he declare who said what. I don’t believe a writer of his calibre would persist in using “he said” other than satirically or under duress. I agree, it IS irritating.
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How fast I read is dependent on how interesting and engaging the text is. I read Robert Benchley about 30 times faster than Frazer.
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I read Carrie by Stephen King in a single sitting, granted the book is short but I was so engaged in the story that I voraciously read through it.
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When my kids were littler, we read The Hobbit together. I would read 10 pages, then they would read one page each, etc. It was great!
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I took a speed reading course at school, out of curiosity, and while there are probably people out there who can process info quickly, it wasn’t even what I’d consider to be reading. They were just teaching people how to skim for relevant info.
I can see where it could come in handy, especially in time crunches, but that wasn’t reading, and I wouldn’t want to do it with literature unless I hadn’t even started the book and have to write about it in a couple hours.
This has nothing to do with the fast reading they’re talking about in the article, though. I just wanna be a part of the conversation.
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Unfortunately, they have to read all the “he said, she said” bits in order to be able to say that the audiobook is an unabridged edition of the book, produced as intended by the author and publisher, yadda yadda.
I wonder if they will start editing separate audio and print versions of books to get around this. It sounds like it would be a ridiculous legal mess to have an audiobook script be recognized as the same work as its print counterpart…
Oh! great idea
I’m the same way. My wife reads at an incredible speed. I just can’t do it. I’ve tried; it just won’t work for me.
This goes a long way towards explaining its structure. Many chapters are basically self contained stories where the dwarves get themselves into some kind of trouble and then some Deus ex Machina swooops in (sometimes literally) to save the day at the end of the chapter. It reads like a collection of short stories stuck together rather than a normal novel. It’s the original pulp! It’s no wonder the movies didn’t work, it should have been adopted as a TV series instead.
As for fast vs. slow reading there is too much stuff out there that I want to read to spend a huge amount of time with any one piece. In the past few years I’ve read all of the existing A Song of Ice and Fire, the Gunslinger saga, the Three Body Problem series, the Ancillary Justice series, the Old Man’s War series, the Hyperion quadriology, Lord of the Rings & Hobbit, Harry Potter series, and plenty more. I still want to read the Diskworld series, Otherland, and plenty others. That’s a lot of words and I only have a handful of hours each week to devote to it. I’m not skimming (I retain a good amount of detail from each work), but I do read at a decent clip.
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I think it could’ve worked well as movie, the problem was the tone of what they went with was totally wrong. They wanted it to tonally match the main LOTR series of movies, but the book is not meant to be a dark fantasy epic. It’s meant as a light hearted, fun and whimsical story. It’s in fact the very classic idea of fantasy with wild capers, wizards, dragons, etc. The second i saw that the studios got Peter Jackson to direct them i knew it’d be a disaster. To this day i think the animated version is the best version but i would love to see a series on the book and if it was also animated i would be even more excited.
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