Making A Case for Slow Reading

I grew up, like many middle to upper-income children in our generation, in a very bookish household. Given how television had forayed into our lives only when we were in high school, reading was an activity that was pursued without the kind of self-consciousness and exoticism that is attached to pretty much anything these days. As unthinkingly as we engaged in other everyday routines – played, walked, cycled, painted, squabbled – we also read.

Later in college, where we were expected to make our way through fairly demanding reading requirements for each course, we read in order to engage with ideas and discover ourselves, as well as to contribute “knowingly” to classroom discussions. By now, since we were young adults, we were perhaps slightly conceited as well about the kinds of books that featured on our Reading Lists – even if those titles only fleetingly inhabited our dorm room bookshelves or resided mostly as soon-to-be-forgotten summaries inside our heads.

After college, entering the working world, and especially a corporate job along with becoming a parent of one and then two kids, denuded the time spent on reading. Though I still retreated into books in the few spare weekend hours, I was conscious about not reading as much or as widely as I might have wanted to. I could even sense my vocabulary slipping; or perhaps morphing into the jargon that was required by various functional roles.

At midlife, when I chose to turn to writing, as a full-time career or vocation, I knew I needed to re-engage more deeply with books. To read for sheer pleasure but to also read, like Francine Prose puts it in her Reading Like a Writer, as an apprentice studying the craft of masters. By then, the internet had already seeped into our lives, so I sometimes zealously and sometimes lackadaisically shepherded my children into libraries and bookstores, to arouse their own love for reading. And like most us who lurk on the strange etheric space between online and offline worlds, I had heard the term “speed reading” bandied about by a few media articles as well as by some online advocates.

At a Public Library, I was enticed by a slim volume that promised to induct me into a wily club of speed readers. Among other promises made by the author, there was the assurance that one would not only be able to read more, but also retain more of anything one read. Since I had only recently inhabited the corporate world, tacking on a productivity metric to my new pursuit seemed perfectly reasonable.

Tapping into the insecurity that resides in most “Readers” – the litany of must-read titles that they haven’t yet read – Pierre Bayard wrote How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Armed with the speed reading guide, I felt I could dispense with Bayard’s advice. I could foresee myself talking about books I had genuinely read, and moreover at a clipping pace. If reading Proust could make for scintillating cocktail conversations, surely reading Proust in a week, could make for more dazzling talk. Better still, if one could flippantly recall passages without slogging through flashcards and other mnemonic devices.

Though my own encounter with the concept was at a rather late stage in my reading life, speed reading as a practice, had apparently been invented by an American schoolteacher named Evelyn Wood in the late 1950s. Since then, the method had been imparted to students and other readers, including political luminaries like President John F. Kennedy. Without getting into the specifics of how it works (or doesn’t), I recall spending a few days tracing my finger or a pen vertically or diagonally across pages, to “chunk” words together rather than dwell on each word individually. To also stop vocalizing or sounding out words, as one combed through pages.

Did it work? Honestly, I’m not sure. Because after a few days of a rather sloppy trial, I decided to stop obsessing with my reading speeds while reading. Surely such metacognition about one’s reading pace could hardly help with the dissecting approach required of writers: “Wow, this is such an astonishing line!” followed immediately by, “How is this such an astonishing line?”

Just like the ubiquity of fast food and its unhealthful consequences was challenged by the slow food movement, speed reading, unsurprisingly, inspired adherents to its antipodal other: slow reading. Surely, we don’t need to carry the frenzy of industrialization (wherein productivity trumps engagement) and consumerism (more reading is better than less) into a paradoxically meditative activity.

As an article in The Guardian (2010) on slow reading puts it, the proponents of slow reading are not necessarily new age. One of the earliest editions of Shakespeare urged us to read the playwright’s works “again and again”. As early as 1887, the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, deliberately tried to impart the methods of slow reading. The emphasis was not even perhaps on how much you retained (again, an industrial measure) or were able to regurgitate, but on lingering with words and texts as a lover might with his or her crush.

Quite naturally, many writers and academics have, since then, been the most vocal proponents of slow reading.  After all, teachers and professors have observed diminishing attention spans in students and in themselves. Since most of us cannot completely resist the tugs of technology or the razzmatazz of the internet, our own capacities to read dense, long texts are being attenuated by the easy availability of more gripping diversions.

Lancelot Fletcher, a Professor of Philosophy, starts his classes by mimicking Nietzsche. He begins his lectures with Nietzsche’s taunting “I am a teacher of slow reading.” Quite often, and especially in American classrooms, this statement is greeted with laughter. After all, why would anyone want to learn slow reading in a country that emphasizes saving time, above all else? He then suggests his students stare at the words and just allow them to be. Naturally, this too is greeted with skepticism. Is he teaching them Zen meditation? Rejecting the postmodern urge to interpret texts as a reader might choose to, he persuades the class to first discover “authorial intent” before filtering it through one’s own interpretive lens. His point, partially, is that we are losing the ability to have conversations because we are all talking or arguing before listening.

As the author of a book titled “Slow Reading,” John Miedema suggests that digital technologies do not favor or encourage slow reading. For one thing, there are distracting hyperlinks, ads and the one-click-away lures into more interesting sites. For societies that are keen on perpetuating literary cultures, libraries would do well to stock themselves with paper books as well as digital media. As Miedema says, “sometimes we must slow down and read at a reflective pace and print facilitates that.”

The threat to literary reading is made starker by the pandemic, where all kids have been forced to engage with screens and online learning technologies. Even as Ed Tech companies spiral into celebrated unicorns, we must stay conscious of the costs of dwelling in a 24×7 technocracy. As the journalist Nicholas Carr, who had awakened us to the perils of “the shallows” well before the documentary The Social Dilemma popped into view, observes “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” (Carr, Nicholas, The Shallows)

As a writer, I am sometimes asked “How do you write?” Without trying to reduce writing to a pat formula, most writers would agree that one of the necessary first steps to writing is reading. Not just any kind of reading, and certainly not speed reading, but slow reading. Which can include re-reading or jotting down summaries or marking your own associations with the text.

Still, I sometimes heed the voice of that cheery speed reading guide, and when I read newspapers, I run a pen along articles, streaking the paper with bizarre, blue vertical lines. Why? In order to read faster? Maybe. Even if it’s just a placebo effect, perhaps Evelyn Wood was onto something. We can choose when we heed her advice, and when we ignore her altogether.  

References

Miedema, John, Slow Reading, Litwin Books, 2009.

Fletcher, Lancelot R., SLOW READING: the affirmation of authorial intent, https://www.academia.edu/3568436/Slow_Reading_the_affirmation_of_authorial_intent

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/jul/15/slow-reading

Prose, Francine, Reading Like a Writer, Harper Perennial, 2006

Carr, Nicholas, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Atlantic Books, 2010