On the Pleasure of Slow Reading

There is a particular shame attached, these days, to admitting that you have spent an entire afternoon on forty pages. Everyone around you is finishing books at a clip that would have embarrassed a nineteenth-century circulating library, posting tidy grids of covers at the end of each month, and you are still on the same chapter you were on last Tuesday, rereading a paragraph because a clause in it did something to your chest that you have not yet identified. I want to suggest, gently but firmly, that this is not a failure of attention. It might be the only kind of attention worth having.

Speed reading, as a discipline, treats the sentence as an obstacle between you and the information behind it, a pane of glass to be seen through rather than looked at. That works well enough for a memo or a tax form, where the words are only a delivery mechanism and the sooner they dissolve the better. But a sentence written with any care is not a delivery mechanism. It is a small, deliberate arrangement of sound, rhythm, and implication, built by someone who revised it eleven times to get the comma in the right place, and reading it quickly is a little like listening to a piece of music at double speed to find out what happens at the end. You will indeed find out what happens. You will not have heard the music.

Reading slowly is a way of paying attention to the sentence, and to the hours the writer spent making it sound effortless. It costs you something real: an evening you could have spent elsewhere, a book count you cannot brag about, the small social currency of having opinions about things you have only skimmed. What it gives back is harder to name but easier to recognize once you have felt it — the sense that a book has actually happened to you, rather than simply passed through you on its way to being filed as read.

Francis Bacon put this better than I can, four hundred years ago, in an essay ostensibly about study:

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

The mistake of our reading culture is to have collapsed all three categories into the last one, and then to have sped that one up until it more closely resembles the first. We swallow the books that deserve chewing, and we mistake the resulting indigestion for having finished something.

None of this is an argument against reading widely, or against abandoning a book that has nothing to say to you. It is an argument against the reflex that treats every page as a checkpoint to be cleared rather than a room to sit in for a while. Some paragraphs want you to stop. Some sentences are built, on purpose, so that you cannot walk past them without turning around. The writers who make these are not being inefficient; they are asking for exactly the kind of attention that a fast reader has trained himself out of giving.

So here is the small, unglamorous practice I would recommend in place of any reading challenge: choose one book you actually want to be with, and read it at the speed a good sentence asks to be read at. Let the count of pages per evening fall to whatever it falls to. You will finish fewer books this year. You may, for the first time in a while, remember all of them.