I Was Wrong About Speed Reading (2015)

The recommendations for more effective reading largely match those in Mortimer Adler's How to Read a Book, particularly chapters 2 (The Second Level of Reading: Inspectional Reading) and 7 (How to X-Ray a Book). Both address how to rapidly determine a book's structure. More generally, Adler suggests approaching reading with intent, that is, what are your goals in reading a book, often corresponding to the type of book. Fiction is different from poetry, practical books, history, science and mathematics, philosophy, and social science (each addressed in the book).

I'm reminded of an HN perennial, "Why GNU grep is Fast" (https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug..., discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1626305), which boils down to two rules:

#1 trick: GNU grep is fast because it AVOIDS LOOKING AT EVERY INPUT BYTE.

#2 trick: GNU grep is fast because it EXECUTES VERY FEW INSTRUCTIONS FOR EACH BYTE that it does look at.

If you want to read faster, read less, and read more intelligently.

By "read less", I mean simply don't waste your time on irrelevant material. For pleasure reading, this doesn't mean skipping large parts of books, in general (there ... are exceptions), but it could very well mean skipping entire books, or deciding that you really don't want to read them. For nonfiction, it may very well mean sucking the marrow out of their bones without getting bogged into the detail. There are few writers who are highly synoptic and for whom all words matter (this is more common in philosophy than elsewhere, though I can think of other examples).

By "more intelligently", I mean understanding what you hope to gain (amusement/entertainment, general information, specific answers to questions, understanding or rebutting an author's arguments, etc.). Skip what doesn't address that goal, and stop once you've attained it.

There is a tremendous amount of published material. There have been about 300,000 traditionally published books annually in English since the 1950s, if not before, and over the past decade or so, "non-traditional" ("vanity", self-published, print-on-demand, ebooks, etc.) raise that number well over 1 million. Given roughly 300 million to 1 billion native English speakers, this means one book per 300 to 1,000 people.

Quality literature is far less common. Many authors have commented on the folly of reading other-than-excellent books. I'd suggest some sampling of the common genres, but ... don't get stuck there, if you can help it.

Shopenhaer addresses this in "On Authorship and Style":

Writing for money and preservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. It is only the man who writes absolutely for the sake of the subject that writes anything worth writing. What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11945/11945-h/11945-h.htm#li...

Diderot the broader problem of a superfluity of books and information overload:

As long as the centuries continue to unfold, the number of books will grow continually, and one can predict that a time will come when it will be almost as difficult to learn anything from books as from the direct study of the whole universe. It will be almost as convenient to search for some bit of truth concealed in nature as it will be to find it hidden away in an immense multitude of bound volumes.

https://www.historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=2877

(This was, of course, a solutions-oriented pitch for a technical IT solution Diderot was launching, the Encyclpaedia.)

A depressing tendency of most speed-reading programmes, and discussions, I've encountered, is that few show any wareness of these extant models and guides. Which makes one wonder if their authors actually read intelligently....

I took a speed reading course one summer when I was in college. My mother thought that it would give me an edge. First they test you and my reading speed was already on the high end of normal.

In the course I did theoretically more than double my reading speed. But my comprehension was based on the test they gave me. Plus I noticed that I tired quickly doing speed reading. I was a kid who loved to read and had no problem doing it for hours on end without tiring.

After the course I quickly discovered as I suspected that my real world comprehension suffered greatly by speed reading.

So what value did I receive from the course? After college there have been times I needed to quickly get the gist of a document and was under extreme time pressure. I found speed reading worked fine though in my business career I doubt that I used it more than once a year.

Bottom line my personal ROI would have been much higher if my Mother have hired a tutor to help me over the summer learn to paint or play blues harmonica instead.

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”

- Carl Sagan

I am a huge Mortimer Adler fan, do you have any other recommendations in the same vein?

You might also like the books by https://cs.adelaide.edu.au/~zbyszek/

I practice what could be called "speed listening" -- listening to audiobooks and podcasts (and watching videos) at 2x to 3x speed.

It saves a lot of time, and I only wish I'd started sooner.