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Talk with the doctor about depression. Genuinely out of all methods I tried for faster reading it turned out antidepressants helped multiple times more than any technique. I know it sounds bizarre but if you're struggling with reading and it feels like every books drags through weeks then it's your best shot.
I made this site to do exactly that: https://www.speakreader.com I've always found it a bit hard to keep focused while reading long text and books. So after trying a lot of things I noticed that this method works really well for me and I was able read almost 7 books in a month with it. Though for me it only works when I set the speed to at least 2.5x normal otherwise I get bored. Also only non-fiction. It's 100% free…
Something that has helped me is not reading books cover to cover. Just pick out the information you need. And read a lot in parallel.
If the end goal is to increase your knowledge then reading faster won't necessarily get you there. You won't process the information faster or retain it any better. Instead, learning to put down a book when it's not good rather than forcing yourself to finish it and taking good notes or writing a book review are better approaches (for the goal of processing and retaining information for longer).
- Do not recite the read text using your inner monologue: process it purely visually
- Start two or three words after the beginning of your sentence so it’s still on your visual field but not at the center
- In the same manner you should be able to finish reading a sentence before your eyes gaze on the last word
Your reading speed in this mode should be a lot faster and becoming quicker with experience. However it’s only useful to check information until you find some useful gems. You cannot skip the traditional way of reading if you hope to learn or grasp some concepts because the cognitive cost is incompressible.
Also learn to detect non-informative paragraphs to accelerate when you see them and even skip them completely if there is 0 chance that they contain some surprising information.
Using this method you are just really learning to scan text using your visual cortex to detect parts which are informative / have a high surprisal factor (which depend of your previous knowledge and your beliefs), which you have then to read normally to assimilate.
Edit: As others have also mentioned for books, if it’s not a mandatory reading and it’s not really informative / you don’t like it the best course of action is to stop reading that book. Scanning through an entire book just to feel good having read it is pointless. NNT gave a neat heuristic: only read books you would read again, and usually if you can skip / visually scan a lot of a book, you would better spend your time reading a more interesting one.
Also IMHO the slowness of reading is not a bug, it's a key feature. It's supposed to be slow. That's why audiobooks can't compare. They just exist because we are a generation of hyper-distracted fear-driven overworked .. crazy people. ;)
Talk with the doctor about depression. Genuinely out of all methods I tried for faster reading it turned out antidepressants helped multiple times more than any technique. I know it sounds bizarre but if you're struggling with reading and it feels like every books drags through weeks then it's your best shot.
Your first challenge (and the one that will allow you consume and absorb more knowledge) is choosing which books to read in the first place.
When it comes to non-fiction, a lot of it either repeats the same information available in other books in the same genre or is crap.
I'd recommend choosing material starting as close to whatever the first principles are of your chosen subject and working up from there. Starting with first principles allows you to understand something enough to help you determine where you need to go next, with the added advantage of giving you the basics so you can synthesise more knowledge from there yourself.
Starting the other way round is fine if you really need to attack a certain area quickly, but it's no substitute for starting with foundational knowledge.
If your goal is to learn information from non-fiction books more quickly, you might be in search of a book summarization service. They outline the main points and cut a typical 4-6 non-fiction pop-science book down into a 15 minute summary. And even if you do read the whole book, it can be helpful to see the main contents outlined if you don't take your own notes.
There is a cottage industry of book summarization services aimed at business types with many to to choose from, like Blinkist or Instaread. Just Google and you'll find several you can look at and see what looks appealing to you.
This might not apply if you are mainly reading textbooks or something more information-dense. But most popular nonfiction books are pretty fluffy and can really be cut down if you aren't reading for enjoyment.