Slow reading: an attempt

Without ever quite intending it, I have spent 30 or so years reading literary fiction and general writing for adults as quickly as possible. For a while there I did it intentionally: Mike Munger promised at our grad school orientation that we would eventually give a book an hour or two (at most) of our time and come away understanding it in total, and lo that was true for my academic career. It remains true in private industry, where an hour for a business book is likely more time than it deserves.

More than once someone has noticed the pace that I read (about one page a minute for your Prousts and Tolstoys, faster for things that don't deserve that amount of attention) and asked if I am speed reading. The reply is always: no, I am actually reading: but 1. I have read a lot in my life and I am very good at it, this is not the same skill as the one I learned in kindergarten and 2. I know when I can skip repetitive detail, especially in nonfiction.

But while academic and professional reading have their own weird place, the same general principles have also been true in my private 'fun' reading: get through everything as quickly as possible; concentrated reading is the best way to read, the better to take on the whole meaning at once; the list of things to read is still long and vita brevis longa ars, gotta get to it.

It's only recently that I have rebelled against this, in pieces, and over a long time: the dream of reading an author's entire oeuvre comes up against the fact that everyone has juvenilia and stinkers (thus raising the question: "what is gained by reading everything that is not similarly gained by reading 80% of everything?"); changing tastes and interests (once someone pointed out the multi-timeline historical novel is pretty easy to organize in Scrivener, it lost a lot of its appeal, and one can see them everywhere); just missing out on the right time for some things (alas, Don Quixote, I would've loved you at 17, but I pledged myself to Dostovesky instead); a willingness to accept that I simply won't live long enough to read everything no matter how long I live; and a decaying sense of what the "everything" I want to read might even consist in.

(Leaving aside also the variety of what gets published: I spent 2021 heavily invested in modern poetry and dozens of collections and chapbooks later I have no better sense of how that market functions than when I started)

So now we're just trying something different: a few things read slowly in discrete pieces every day.