Right now, I am currently reading William L. Shrier’s The Rise and Fall of The Third Reich because I had once gotten to page \~300, years ago but I never finished it, and going into it, I knew it was going to be arduous, but my mom always used to tell stories about my Uncle Tom (and no that is not a joke) who was really intelligent and could do this thing called speed-reading where he could skim through pages at at least 2000 wpm and tell you exactly what it was about, so I started practicing because I knew if I didn’t I would never finish the book. However, there is this dilemma growing inside me.
I can get up to about 500 wpm and I can understand to a certain extent what I am reading through repeating key phrases or peoples names, but it’s not even really reading at that point, it’s more like just picking through words and forming them into concepts, and, ya know, a big part of books is just a bunch of exposition which I hate; It’s probably why I’ll never write a book because it would be non-fictional and it would just be stating facts or some bs philosophy that I have, I always think about that Einstein quote, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough”, but in looking for it I found this quote as well, “Any story, no matter how good, will sound really, really dumb when you shorten it to a few sentences” and that is my dilemma. I mean I only like to read philosophy books, but speed-reading them, in my opinion, doesn’t do them justice.
Do you think speed-reading takes away one of the key aspects of reading, which is to get enveloped in a world? I mean is determinate on what you want to get out of it, but at the same time, I feel it does take a lot the feeling away. What do you think?
by RevolutionaryRule138