On Reading Slowly

There was a year when I measured reading in books finished. I kept a list, and the list kept me honest, or so I told myself. What it actually did was turn every book into a distance to be covered rather than a place to stay.

I don’t read that way anymore. Somewhere between the fortieth and fiftieth title of that year I noticed I couldn’t remember the middle of any of them. I had the covers memorized and the arguments gone.¹

The turn

The change was small and slightly embarrassing: I started underlining the same sentence twice, on two different days, and only on the second pass realizing I had underlined it before. That doubled line became a kind of instrument. If a sentence survived a second reading — if it still stopped me — it was worth copying out.²

Slow reading is not a virtue I discovered. It is at least as old as the people who copied books by hand, for whom reading and transcribing were the same motion.³ What is new is only how much I had to unlearn to get back to it.

The book you finish is not always the book you read.

What it costs, what it returns

Reading slowly costs you the list. You will “get through” less. In exchange you keep more, and — this surprised me — you notice your own attention, the way it drifts and returns, which turns out to be most of what studying is.⁴

I still keep a list. It’s just shorter now, and every line on it is one I could talk about for an hour.

Footnotes

1. On the gap between recognition and recall in heavy readers, see the discussion of encoding depth in my note, A Short Literature Review on Flow States. ↩

2. This is the practice I trace at length in A Commonplace Book, Six Months In. ↩

3. Paul Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford University Press, 1997), 6–13. ↩

4. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper & Row, 1990), ch. 2. ↩