Reading, Fast and Slow

How slowing down made me win my reading experience back

Photo by Brandi Redd on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

Fast reading courses were all the rage when I decided to take one, several years ago. Maybe they still are. I always make the same mistake: that I myself have lost interest in something is not a reliable indicator that that something has gotten out of fashion or is no longer a thing. They call them biases, tricks that our mind plays on us and that we, as humans, naturally fall for.

So I took that course and I kind of learned to read fast(er) and I felt a sense of accomplishment because I was now part of this universal productivity community of people that possess the tools to do more and more and more. An enlightened few who have been given the keys to productivity paradise by God himself (or herself). 

And I wouldn’t miss a chance to show that: every time I was with someone and there was something to read and both pairs of eyes were on it, be it the plaque next to a painting at a museum, or a few lines on the tv screen, or a couple of paragraphs on a magazine page, I had to finish first. I was in a relentless reading race. Even when I was alone: I constantly had to prove to myself that I could read much faster than any other mere mortal. Speed was all that mattered. I was obsessed. 

But then of course, nine times out of ten, I’d have to go back and re-read. This time slower, if I wanted to understand -- and eventually retain -- anything.

What was going on? If being more productive was meant to make me feel more content and accomplished, something was clearly missing. Was I, though? Was I really more productive? What was the point of flying through a page line by line at the speed of light, only to go back and revisit most of it for actual comprehension? Sure, fast reading techniques give you some significant time savings in exchange for a shallow understanding of the text, and for many readers that’s an advantageous trade. But is a shallow understanding enough?

It took me some time to admit to myself that it wasn’t enough, that my reading experience had substantially worsened, and that I (desperately) wanted it to go back to normal.         

So I decided to unlearn, and soon realized that it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be. My approach to the written page had gotten so performance-driven that I was now nervous, restless, and impatient every time I had to start reading. As weird as it may sound, I was no longer reading for myself. I was reading for an imaginary jury that would issue a guilty or not-guilty verdict based on whether I had reached the end of each page fast enough. The damage was done. This was not good. 

My reading had to go back to being an experience, not a performance. Unfortunately, the course I took had no reading-experience-back guarantee. The unwinding was going to be on me.

With time, I re-learned to approach reading as the pleasure that I wanted it to be, and that entailed some self-therapy work on relaxing, taking my time, and focusing. I was slowly getting back to where I started from when I decided to take that course, except with the renewed awareness that reading is a journey to places that I’ve never seen, where time is a variable that should be expanded, not compressed.

Why do we read? I asked myself this question many times while I was trying to get my reading normality back. And for a long time I couldn’t come up with a satisfactory answer. Reading for me has to be a feel-good and an information-gathering experience at the same time, I guess. But that’s too easy. There must be something else, something more profound to it.

Then, one day, I stumbled upon this Proust quote: “I believe that reading, in its original essence, is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude”. And I had an epiphany.  

Reading gives us both our best thoughts and the opportunity to communicate with the best thoughts of others. It’s communicative and it’s solitary. And that is a miracle that can be summoned at will, but only if and when we decide to add one critical ingredient to our experience: depth. 

Deep reading happens when we read our best, and reading our best takes time. We cannot deep-read in a hurry. 

Maryanne Wolf, a researcher at U.C.L.A., wrote two super interesting books on the relationship between reading and neuroscience: “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain” and “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World”. 

Her view is that deep reading is a state we increasingly struggle to get ourselves in due to the information overload that characterizes our present times. Digital media, reading on screens, have made skimming and scrolling our default reading mode because of all the information that we have to process everyday, and we are transferring this superficial experience, this information-gathering priority mode to printed books. 

In a recent interview, she said that “we have become all -- all of us -- cognitively impatient: we don’t want to spend the time”.

One of the things that we lose when we’re skimming or scanning on a screen is what’s called comprehension monitoring. When we’re reading a printed book, we’re almost unconsciously going a little ahead of our effective comprehension of the text, but at the same time our eyes often go back to check and revisit what we’ve read a second ago. This comprehension monitoring is an important activity that disappears when we try to get to the end of a text as fast as possible. So we are sometimes missing very important details in a plot or in an essay. The first cause of this is the speed with which we’re used to skimming, scanning, scrolling; a habit that we unconsciously transfer to the printed text. 

“When we’re skimming and scrolling, we can easily just stay at the level of the tip of the iceberg, because we’re not being poised to think of what we’re reading”.

We have to build -- or rebuild -- a kind of reading that’s after the innermost landscape of our thinking, what Wolf calls the Sanctuary of Reading. 

Proust saw the heart of reading as “the place where we go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover our own”. It is, in a way, a journey of introspection. If our goal is to really understand something at its deepest level of complexity, where connections magically occur and novel thought gets created, or just simply to perceive the beauty of a carefully chosen word or paragraph, then we have to really take our time and immerse ourselves into a deep reading process.

This whole view led me to reconsider a few aspects of my reading experience. I not only worked my way back to normal speed, but I also added slowness. 

I’m now trying to read slowly. To do this, I get into a state that I would liken to a phone’s airplane mode, a state that I seem to access whenever reading without distractions for a relatively long period of time. And when I’m there, two things seem to happen at the same time: 1) I’m laser-focused on the text I’m reading, and 2) my thinking expands and connects to other ideas, I get insights and solutions to problems, I catch myself placing thoughts between words or sentences. It’s contemplative, meditative, but also epiphanic. 

Slow reading, often viewed as one of the enemies of productivity, fosters more productive thinking. How ironic is that?   

I also realized that the time I spend on a book really matters, at least as much as the information I can absorb from it. Even when a book is over-extending an idea that could be expressed in just a few pages, some of its value to the reader is actually the time spent there wrestling with the idea, molding it, connecting with other ideas, and creating novel thoughts. In other words, there’s a lot of value in the process that reading ignites, besides the product itself.   

So, for me, slow reading has been an extraordinary discovery and I’m always amazed at how underrated it is.

In this day and age, where speed and synthesis have become priorities and widely recognized as values, making an effort to slow down and connect more deeply with what we read is something that we owe both ourselves and whoever decide to share their thoughts with us.     

I know many people who are perfectly happy with their fast reading techniques and couldn’t do without them. I wouldn’t have gotten to appreciate slowness had I not learned fast reading first -- it’s been a journey that took me where I wasn't supposed to go. 

But I’m thankful to be there.

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