For a few years I kept a reading log. It was a tidy spreadsheet with a column for the date I finished each book, a column for pages, and a running total at the top that I checked more often than I would like to admit. One December I hit seventy-one books and felt a small, ridiculous glow. Then I tried to describe the argument of the fourth book on the list, and could not remember what it had been about.
That was the end of the spreadsheet. It did not take long to see what had gone wrong. I had been treating reading as something to clear, like an inbox, and a book is not an inbox. It is a conversation, and conversations cannot be rushed without being ruined.
What speed costs
Skimming gives you the outline of an argument and none of its texture. You can repeat the conclusion, but you cannot defend it, because you never saw the places where the author hesitated, or the example that made the claim believable. That is a thin kind of knowing, and it tends to evaporate in a few weeks.
Fast reading also trains a certain impatience. If every page is a tax to be paid on the way to the finish, you start to prefer books that are easy to finish, and you quietly abandon the ones that ask something of you. My seventy-one books were, I now see, mostly the ones that never pushed back.
The paragraph that made me stop
I remember the book that broke the habit. It was a novel with long, winding sentences, and about forty pages in I reached a paragraph I could not get through at speed. My eyes kept sliding off it. So I read it again, aloud, and then once more, and by the third reading I understood that the whole book was folded into those eight lines.
I closed the book and sat for a minute. It was the first time in months that I had felt a book change the way I was paying attention, instead of merely informing me. I went back to the beginning and read it again, slowly, over three weeks. I remember nearly all of it.
A few rules for slowing down
I do not follow these strictly, but they describe what slow reading looks like in practice.
- Finish a chapter, close the book, and say aloud what it argued, in your own words. If you cannot, read the chapter again.
- Keep a pencil nearby and underline less than you think you should. The point is to choose, and choosing is a form of understanding.
- Reread the sentence that made you pause. It almost always has more in it than you noticed on the first pass.
- Stop at the end of a good page, not in the middle of a dull one. You will want to come back.
- Never keep a count. The moment there is a number, there is a race.
Reading as a relationship with time
A book is a relationship with a particular length of time. Some are meant to be read in a weekend, and some should be lived with for a season. The mistake is not reading fast or slowly. It is applying one speed to everything, and above all to the books that were written to be slow.
When I read well now, I notice I am not trying to get anywhere. I am simply there, in the sentence, for as long as it takes. It is one of the few remaining activities in my day that asks for nothing except presence, and it gives a surprising amount back.
Slow reading in a fast week
The practical objection is that slow reading sounds lovely for someone with an empty calendar. Most of us do not have one. We have jobs, children, commutes, and a persistent suspicion that we ought to be doing something more useful with our evenings. I felt this strongly when I started, and I want to be honest that slow reading did not happen automatically. It had to be arranged.
What helped was making it small. I now read for twenty minutes before bed, with my phone charging in another room, and that is a protected habit rather than an aspiration. Twenty minutes read well, with full attention, does more for me than two hours read with one eye on a screen. On good weeks I add a Saturday morning with a pot of tea. On bad ones, I keep the twenty minutes and let the rest go.
The commute is another place. If you travel by train or bus, a book is a better companion than a feed. Not because phones are wicked, but because a book is the only thing in your bag designed to hold your attention for a long time, and a rare thing in the day that does not ask you to switch.
Reading for work is a different job
I should draw a distinction. There are books you read to find something out, and books you read to be changed by. Reports, manuals, and reference works belong to the first kind, and it is perfectly sensible to skim them, search them, and read only what you need. Nobody should read a tax guide slowly for pleasure.
The trouble is that we have let the habits of the first kind leak into the second. We skim novels and essays as though they were manuals, hunting for the point, and the point is precisely what they do not have. A good essay is not a delivery vehicle for a conclusion. It is the experience of following a particular mind through a problem, and you cannot get that from the summary any more than you can get a walk from a map.
So I try to ask, before I open anything, which kind of reading this is. If I am hunting, I hunt quickly and without guilt. If I am being invited into someone’s thinking, I slow right down, and accept that I will finish fewer things. It is a trade I make deliberately, and I have never regretted it.
A smaller library
Slow readers tend to own fewer books and know them better. That is not a rule so much as a consequence: if you let a book finish with you before you start the next, there are simply fewer of them. My shelves are shorter than they were, and each book on them has a pencil mark or a folded corner that I could point to.
I finished twenty-three books last year. I could tell you something specific about every one of them, and I expect to remember most for a long time. If I had to choose between that and seventy-one, I would choose it without hesitation, and I would not feel the need to count.
