Confessions Of A Slow Reader

by

Mackenzie Patel

Although sifting through thousands of words and paragraphs is pure ecstasy for me, I’m not the fastest reader in the universe. I often have to read slowly and then reread several times phrases, whole pages, or even entire chapters until the gist of words becomes crystallized in my memory. I’ve noticed that the snobbier online book communities are teeming with self righteous readers that claim to devour two to three books a week. How do those souls do it? Do they merely skim the text, the delicious prose slipping through the mind like water through teeth? Reading quickly has always eluded me—not because I don’t practice enough or understand the context, but because my brain starts aching and my eyes become blurred after a few chapters. It’s frustrating at times because I desperately want to place my bookmark at chapter 21, but I end up dejectedly sticking it in the middle of chapter 18. Anna Karenina took me nearly four months to finish as well as Lord of the Rings. However, I’ve realized that how quickly one reads doesn’t gauge their literary competency or dampen their claim to love novels.  Classes, work, and exercising command the majority of my attention, the sliver of time allocated to reading/writing slimmer than fat free pumpkin pie. I wish I could read two books at week and truly read them, not just skip my eyes over random phrases to turn the pages more quickly. Books are meant to be slowly parsed and delicately savored, their flavor and style roasting for a long while until their essence is fully revealed. I initially felt ashamed each time I traipsed to the library to renew Anna Karenina for the umpteenth time. My librarian would look sheepishly at my challenging expression and sigh as he stamped yet another elusive due date on the card. However, if I just glided over Tolstoy’s genius, I would not have realized Anna’s gradual decline into insanity or Serezha’s ruined childhood so deeply. Read on for tips to suck out the meaning of books and finish them relatively quickly. Just remember that when touting your literary achievements, it’s not about how many books you managed to snag off the shelf and shallowly scoop into your mind; it’s about an understanding of the characters, relishing the diction of the author, and thinking, thinking, thinking.

1. Listen to classical music while you read—although rocking out to Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody would be more distracting than mindless, listening to Debussy or softer classical music has made reading more entertaining. I usually can’t read unless there is zero noise, but classical music seems this escape this mind barrier. The music just plays into the novel, creating a background for characters to unwind their personalities and actions in. Everything—from the leaking of the faucet to the chomping of jaws–melts into the piano, the strings taking the brunt of mundane noises and returning something beautiful.
2. Read in the morning versus late at night—I’m not a night owl, not by a long shot, yet all of my heavy duty reading and existential writing seems to happen around 9 and 10 at night. However, since I’ve been hitting the shelves early in the morning, the sluggishness of the words hasn’t dragged me down as much. Some of my best memories from living at home were drinking coffee in the morning, a battered, large-print copy of Lord of the Rings accompanying my cheerios while my dad read the Sunday paper.
3. Read books you’re genuinely interested in—I’ve learned this age-old lesson the hard way, and yet a surprising amount of people lurking around the internet seem to disagree with me. CAPSLOCKING their angry statements and italicizing their pretension, many claim to always finish a book, no matter how much they dislike it. How draconian is that! Forcing the novels into your hands is worse than any high school required reading (which I mostly enjoyed). Don’t let certain novels shackle you and transform your love of reading into something gray and ugly. I learned my lesson with The Red Badge of Courage, so that next time a book didn’t click (i.e. On the Road), I promptly dropped it after tasting a few chapters.
4. Have no distractions around when you read—Heathcliff and Holden will always be infinitely more thrilling than Twitter, but I still end up checking my Instagram feed intermittently when I read. It’s like trying to write an article while taking a Buzzfeed quiz about whether I’m more hobbit or elf—it’s impossible to produce high quality work! So next time Facebook seduces you, swat it away in favor of truly spending time with your characters—who says they’re not real people?
5. Get pumped to pick up that novel—I talk about Antoine Laurain incessantly, but such a uniquely shaped cloud of story surrounds this author and his works that he is unforgettable for me. I first heard of his translated novel on BookRiot and fell in love with the whimsical cover and the fact that Laurain is Parisian. I had to specially order The Red Notebook and The President’s Hat from B&N, which made its journey into my hands all the more thrilling. With its playfulness and European taste, these novels laughed at the impossibly high standards I set for them and surpassed them.

Even if these tips don’t help you, realize that it’s okay to read slowly and get a literary-induced headache once in a while (or, if you’re like me, once a week). You don’t have to be a speed reader to be an expert on classics or nonfiction–just be a passionate lover of those spines, an acute observer, and an insightful bystander that forms a relationship with those imaginary strangers.