Reading fast and slow

One way to pick up the pace is to reverse the order: to read faster, read more. With time, you should be better at skimming and racing through passages while absorbing meaning. The question is: should you gallop through a book simply to reach the finishing line?

To a great extent, the Internet has made all of us read more and retain less. The way we thumb through headlines, posts, comments and listicles every day has led Nicholas Carr, among other writers, to bemoan what the digital age has done to our attention spans.

In response, a slow reading movement has sprung up, although it was the redoubtable Nietzsche who coined the phrase as long ago as 1886. He declared then that he was “a teacher of slow reading” and it was his habit “to write nothing but what will drive to despair everyone who is in a hurry.”

Refusing to stare into the abyss and inspired by Carlo Petrini's Slow Food Movement, author Alexander Olchowski established a Slow Book Movement in 2009 for “a reawakening to the act of reading”. Others such as John Miedema have called for a deeper and more individual relationship with stories and ideas. As he puts it in his book, Slow Reading, this is an advantage and a pleasure when reading fiction and an aid to comprehension with a complex text.

In Reading Like A Writer, Francine Prose points to another aspect: it shows how words are the raw material from which books are crafted. Slow and close reading, she emphasises, reveals “the seemingly obvious but oddly underappreciated fact that language is the medium we use in much the same way a composer uses notes, the way a painter uses paint.”

Slow reading brings more than aesthetics and comprehension to the table. Absorption in a book can also create a pleasurable, meditative state of mind that acts as a brake in an age of acceleration. As Milan Kundera wrote in Slowness: “When things happen too fast, nobody can be certain about anything, about anything at all, not even about himself.”

For Mahatma Gandhi, slow reading was a form of satyagraha, says Isabel Hofmeyr in Gandhi’s Printing Press. The book delves into his time as editor of Indian Opinion in South Africa, showing how he carefully selected texts for the paper and inserted ethical extracts into hasty news items to make readers slow down. The aim was to encourage individual autonomy, not through abstract ideals but through small daily textual practices.

As he wrote, “You must get into the habit of looking intensely at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable—nay, letter by letter.” This way of reading is like mining, seeking gold in “little fissures”.
Given that there’s hardly a shortage of reading matter in our lives, it makes sense not to apply a habit of slow reading across the board. As with riding a bicycle, you can speed up in the right circumstances and decelerate to enjoy the journey at other times. Miedema’s wise advice is that you should exercise the ability to slow down at will.

Often, it’s the book itself that sets the pace. You can skim-read some pages of Moby Dick and take your time with others; you can race breathlessly through a thriller and linger over every passage of Pessoa. After all, reading isn’t a competition. Concepts such as optimisation, productivity and targets are best left to those in boardrooms.