By: Max Liu / The Guardian
Translation: Telegrafi.com
How long does it take you to read this article? It would probably take me longer. The average adult reads about 240 words per minute, but I always exceed those pesky "reading time" estimates that appear in some articles. I review books professionally, but it still takes me longer - than almost anyone else I know - to read a book. Maybe I should feel a little embarrassed about that - but instead, I'm just enjoying it.
I inherited the habit of reading for pleasure from my mother, who in my childhood memories is always sitting at the kitchen table flipping through novels or travel literature about places we didn't get to visit. Reading is the first thing I do in the morning and the last thing I do at night, never going anywhere without a little book in my pocket or a hardcover in my bag or both. I'm like David Foster Wallace's character in Infinite Jest, who says: "I do things like that when I get in a taxi and say, 'The library and I'm going there.'"
But it's always taken me a long time. When I started reviewing books a decade ago, I averaged 20 pages an hour. I've sped up to about 30 pages, but that's still slow, according to one literary critic I know who thinks "most people would read a page a minute" and another who says he can read 60 to 100 pages in an hour.
Book reviewers aren’t the only ones under pressure to read quickly. Images of “all the books I read this month” are ubiquitous on social media, and in an age when we seem to be living from one crisis to the next, reading studies is the way to keep going. Books constantly help us understand Brexit, the economy, environmental catastrophe, war, viruses. Some are a shining shield against what Saul Bellow called “the potter’s wheel,” while others read something like powerful articles that opportunistically fall for weak books. It’s understandable that we read to make sense of events, but this can also feed the idea that reading is a chore, which it absolutely isn’t.
Adding to this sense are apps that help you speed through those massive piles of books. Blinkist breaks down books into "easy-to-read insights," presenting "the main points from a scholarly book in a few short, easy-to-read results." Spreeder teaches you techniques to speed up your reading pace and promises to "make reading faster, easier, and more enjoyable."
Why should pleasure be synonymous with pace? My slow reading seems to be due to a combination of slower processing speeds and the process of “underscoring”—sounding out words as I read them. But, especially when it comes to the latter, I wouldn’t want to train myself to go any faster. It was news to me that not everyone reads under their breath, because one of my favorite things about reading in any genre is hearing the language in my mind. “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a glint in his eye that’s almost hopeful,” says the opening sentence of Don DeLillo’s “Underworld,” one of my favorite novels. Without it, I wouldn’t have caught the music of those words when I picked up the book by chance in 1999.
The holiday season is the perfect time to slow down and read a good book. But the New Year is also a time when people make resolutions to read more. You might set a yearly reading goal on Goodreads and elsewhere, but then it can be tempting to prioritize shorter books or faster reads in order to reach your goal. There’s nothing wrong with short books, as this year’s Booker Prize shortlist proved, but reading with one eye on the goal is self-defeating. As Zadie Smith wrote: “When you practice reading and work on a text, it can only give you what you put into it.”
It is a place for the routine and structure of our reading. I recently finished African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, an 800-page anthology edited by Kevin Young. It begins in the XNUMXth century with the work of enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, before moving through the Harlem Renaissance and on to contemporaries such as Claudia Rankine and Danez Smith. For two years I read the poems every morning for the four minutes it took me to drink my coffee. It was a great reminder that reading is never about quantity and always about the quality of time you spend with a text.
So if you're looking for a reading resolution in 2023, don't put a number on it - resolve to read for pleasure, not as a chore. /Telegraph/
