I'm not capable of reading a good, compelling book slowly. My eye falls on a sentence for an instant, and my brain has already read it. I feel like this might not be normal? I dunno. It's not really a useful or even desirable skill, but there it is. (I can go back over a difficult passage to make sure I really understood it before going on, but that doesn't slow my overall rate much.)
But I'm confused, because the author alternates between two different things they call "reading slowly": actually reading slowly, and reading many books in parallel so you cover a lot of pages but take a long time to finish anything.
Which sounds like pointless self-flagellation to me. My reading is driven forward because I want to know what happens. Putting down a good book after 10 pages so I can read a different good book for 10 pages would feel like...I'm struggling to come up with a comparison that isn't some kind of self-denial sex fetish thing.
But I'm confused, because the author alternates between two different things they call "reading slowly": actually reading slowly, and reading many books in parallel so you cover a lot of pages but take a long time to finish anything.
Which sounds like pointless self-flagellation to me. My reading is driven forward because I want to know what happens. Putting down a good book after 10 pages so I can read a different good book for 10 pages would feel like...I'm struggling to come up with a comparison that isn't some kind of self-denial sex fetish thing.