I read about a book a week, almost exclusively non-fiction, generally falling somewhere between the popular science and textbook level. Occasionally I’ll throw a sci-fi novel into the mix.
I’d love to speed this up, since my reading list grows much faster than books get completed, but I’m not sure how (other than simply spending more time reading). Has anyone had luck with speed-reading techniques , such as Tim Ferriss’s?
In some periods of my life I’ve read about a book a day (almost entirely fiction), but I mostly look back at those periods with regret, because I suspect my reading was largely based on the desire to escape an unpleasant reality that I understood as inherent to reality rather than something contingent that I could do something about.
As an adult I have found myself reading non-fiction directed at life goals more often and fiction relatively less. Every so often I go 3 months without reading a book but other times I get through maybe 1 a week, but part of this is that non-fiction is generally just a slower read because they actually have substantive content that must be practiced or considered before it really sticks. With math texts I generally slow down to maybe 1 to 10 pages a day.
With non-fiction, I also tend to spend relatively a lot of time figuring out what to read, rather than simply reading it. When I become interested in a subject I don’t mind spending several hours trying to work out the idea space and find “the best book” within that field.
I’ve never made efforts to learn speed reading because the handful of times I’ve met someone who claimed to be able to do it and was up for a test, their reading comprehension seemed rather low. We’d read the same thing and then I’d ask them about details of motivation or implication and they would have difficulty even remembering particular scenes or plot elements, leaving out their implications entirely.
With speed reading, I sometimes get the impression that people are aiming for “having read X” as the goal, rather than “having read X and learned something meaningful from it”.
The stuff Ferriss covers is normal enough. It’s better to think of it as remedial reading techniques for people (most everyone) who don’t read well than as speeding up past ‘normal’. For example, if you’re subvocalizing everything you read, You’re Doing It Wrong. For your average LW reader, I’d suggest that anything below 300WPM is worth fixing.
I read about a book a week, almost exclusively non-fiction, generally falling somewhere between the popular science and textbook level. Occasionally I’ll throw a sci-fi novel into the mix.
I’d love to speed this up, since my reading list grows much faster than books get completed, but I’m not sure how (other than simply spending more time reading). Has anyone had luck with speed-reading techniques , such as Tim Ferriss’s?
In some periods of my life I’ve read about a book a day (almost entirely fiction), but I mostly look back at those periods with regret, because I suspect my reading was largely based on the desire to escape an unpleasant reality that I understood as inherent to reality rather than something contingent that I could do something about.
As an adult I have found myself reading non-fiction directed at life goals more often and fiction relatively less. Every so often I go 3 months without reading a book but other times I get through maybe 1 a week, but part of this is that non-fiction is generally just a slower read because they actually have substantive content that must be practiced or considered before it really sticks. With math texts I generally slow down to maybe 1 to 10 pages a day.
With non-fiction, I also tend to spend relatively a lot of time figuring out what to read, rather than simply reading it. When I become interested in a subject I don’t mind spending several hours trying to work out the idea space and find “the best book” within that field.
I’ve never made efforts to learn speed reading because the handful of times I’ve met someone who claimed to be able to do it and was up for a test, their reading comprehension seemed rather low. We’d read the same thing and then I’d ask them about details of motivation or implication and they would have difficulty even remembering particular scenes or plot elements, leaving out their implications entirely.
With speed reading, I sometimes get the impression that people are aiming for “having read X” as the goal, rather than “having read X and learned something meaningful from it”.
The stuff Ferriss covers is normal enough. It’s better to think of it as remedial reading techniques for people (most everyone) who don’t read well than as speeding up past ‘normal’. For example, if you’re subvocalizing everything you read, You’re Doing It Wrong. For your average LW reader, I’d suggest that anything below 300WPM is worth fixing.