Slow-reading is superior to speed-reading

One of my favorite college literature professors used to make quite a point of telling us how unnaturally fast our reading behavior as students was (and then following that up with telling us we had to do it anyways). His classes required each student to read about one novel along with supplemental literary criticism every week. When he would hand out a course syllabus at the start of a quarter, he’d point out the big books in that quarter’s curriculum and tell us not to even try to read those ones in a week. “Get started on those ones early,” he’d say.

This professor told us that there was no way we would have anything close to the reading experience that most of these authors intended for us. “When you read Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment,’” he said, “it’s supposed to consume your life for months at a time.” As students, we didn’t have that luxury of time and I’ll be the first to admit, our comprehension inevitably suffered… Going back and reading some of these classics again, on my own timetable, has proven to be incredibly rewarding.

The same professor explained to us the desired experience of reading a book at its appropriate pacing. While there is much variability in determining the correct pace for the consumption of a book, a lot of it is just trying to determine who a given book is written for and then adjusting your pace to how you believe that audience would absorb the material. For example, let’s return to “Crime and Punishment” for a moment: this famous novel was originally published in 1866 as a series of 12 monthly installments in a journal called “The Russian Messenger.” This means that the audience at that time was reading this book over a period that stretched more than a year. And yet, the literature class I read this novel for, scheduled a week (although I think spent a total of 3 weeks on it). How do you think my experience varied from the one of the original audience?

I think that there’s something to be said for readers who go too fast… “DON’T.”

Resist the urge to go quickly with books that should require your full attention. Reading is not a race, at least it isn’t after high school. Be one of the rare people that digs into texts and extracts something beautiful.

To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s. - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment