On reading slowly

I hear a lot of talk from my friends and fellow readers about how they read so many books, or an entire shelf in a week, or maybe half the library. It's pretty impressive. I admire people who can burn through a thousand pages in a day and ask for more.

I'm not one of them.

I used to read just as voraciously, but I realized at some point that I wasn't enjoying the books I read. What's more, I was barely understanding them. I found that if I read a long book quickly, I could come back not a week later and find entire scenes I'd failed to understand. Sometimes, forgotten completely! From that point on, when I read, I make a point to slow down, to sip rather than to guzzle.

Slowing down has a lot of perks, but the biggest one is being able to see the layers. Regardless of genre, any story, long or short, can be read on a number of levels, and reading slowly makes that much easier. For me, writing is as much a mechanical exercise as a creative one, and I learn new techniques by dissecting what I read. That means paying attention to not only what's going on in the story, but to the craftsmanship behind it. I read and digest and reread sentences, paragraphs, sometimes entire scenes, taking them apart, examining the pieces, and figuring out how they work together. Once I understand the techniques a writer uses, I can imitate them, play with them, and incorporate them into my own writing.

Of course, examining the workings of a piece is just one way slow reading can help. You can also examine themes within the piece, gain a deeper understanding of the characters and their interactions, examine the piece within the context of real-world events, or think of it in any other way you can imagine. Perhaps you can read it on several levels at once, or perhaps you might have to read it several times to fully understand it. You might even write down your thoughts about it as you read, as I do from time to time. That's up to you.

How, then, do you slow down? If you've been reading for as long as I have, you might find you have a tendency to read faster and faster over time. This is natural: after reading a certain writer long enough, your brain will learn their style well enough that you start anticipating where their sentences will go and skimming over words and sentences. Resist this instinct. To stop my brain from speeding up and blowing through pages at a time, I try to read the story aloud, word by word, in my head, to hear the characters' voices and picture the scene. If skim though something by accident, I'll go back and reread it, then and there.

So next time you're reading something, be it for pleasure, work, or any other reason, force yourself to slow down. You might enjoy the results!