Read Slowly to Benefit Your Brain and Cut Stress

I also question their stress relief. It seems it might be tied to people enjoying themselves for a little bit of time many times a week. I don't know if the research exists, but I will guess if everyone engaged in something selfish or something they actually thoroughly enjoy for 30 minutes many days a week, the person's stress levels would go down.

BTW, one could speed-read only texts on a familiar subjects, the way most of us read 90% of narcissistic nonsense here. On the contrary, those wery rare pieces of meaningful thought from self-made professionals (nothing in common with so-called and usually self-proclaimed 'experts') requires this slow reading of 'the deep structure' - reconstruction of author's model of the universe.

Roughly speaking, I think the better a book is, the less I tend to skim. A truly great novel I will read at probably 10% of the speed of a bad one. (If it's really bad, of course, I stop reading and throw it away.. that's probably the case with 20% of the novels I start).

With most nonfiction, technical books, etc., it is different -- I skim as much as I can while still extracting the info/knowledge I am trying to get out of it.

Second point that I loved is - books are best rather than PDFs. Guess what - whenever I use to travel in trains I use to read leadership novels of Robin Sharma. Ebooks are good but they are not as effective as physical books are.

-nitin

If you were reading for pleasure you could have a similar dichotomy. I read a contemporary espionage thriller a few weeks ago and flew through it; it was enjoyable but quite predictably plotted and the characters unburdened by doubt, so reading the book was a simple matter of finding out how the hero arrived at the showdown and what he did when he got there (you'll no doubt be relieved to know that the free world was saved, once again).

Then I read a literary novel with another novel embedded within in, and a lead character engaged in teaching literary criticism - quite a challenging book due to the near-constant tension between narrative and narrative purpose, with the latter becoming a key element of the former, via an imagined obscenity trial for the book-within-a-book. This was further complicated by the fact that I found most of the characters deeply unsympathetic...at first. As you can imagine, this one required a considerable degree of thought and reflection, and my reading speed varied considerably with the subject matter - and I anticipate it will influence my perception of other books going forward, so in that sense I'm still reading it despite having got to the end.

Currently I'm reading a science-fiction book examining the psychological construction of identity, Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. And although I've read it twice already (having been into his work for some 30 years now), and although it's quite a short book, it's going to take weeks because of Lem's narrative density - he tells simple stories but with a deliberately unfiltered attention to detail which demands total mental attention.

All are enjoyable, but all provide very different reading experiences and demand different things from the reader.