I’ve been ramping up my reading this summer: more books, and more diverse reading material, have been my goal, since I felt like my college career didn’t really allow me to explore outside of my cirriculum[1]I feel horrible saying that; GWU did a wonderful job giving me both liberal arts and engineering literature. But there’s only so much time.. To start this journey, I drew inspiration from my grade school days. When I was really young, my mother figured out that the best way to get me to read was to make it goal-oriented; to this end, we started to list all of the books that I had read onto my own little booklet made out of construction paper. The goal was 100 books read in a year[2]Picture books count!, and I think we made that goal handily. It was a good feeling, holding this construction paper booklet of acomplishment.
Remembering this, I decided to start recording my reading activity again (on this website, no less). Reading is a goal in itself, I realize, but at the beginning of the summer I was so invigorated by the book count that I started to speed-read through the literature I found, similar to the way I would speed-read through a research paper. This worked, for a while, and I kept my cadence up… until I picked up John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. Updike’s writing demands to be thought over, seen through, digested; I found it difficult, even undesirable, to sweep through the pages at 1000 wpm, because there was so much lost in the experience. It wasn’t just mood that was lost: it was those subtle weights given to a phrase, or those small actions that would end up changing a character inherently. I think that’s the word for it: subtle. There’s so much going on behind the dialog that to speed-read (with my technique, at least) doesn’t allow me to fully comprehend the moment.
All of this is to say: some things are meant for speed-reading, and some are not. I hope to fill my summers with the latter.