tl;dr: read multiple things concurrently so you read them “slowly” over multiple days, weeks, months
When I was a kid, it took a long time to read a book. How could it not: I didn’t know all the words, my attention span was shorter, I was more restless, I got lost and had to reread more often, I got bored more easily, and I simply read fewer words per minute. One of the effects of this is that when I read a book I got to live with it for weeks or months as I worked through it.
I think reading like that has advantages. By living with a book for longer the ideas it contained had more opportunity to bump up against other things in my life. I had more time to think about what I had read when I wasn’t reading. I more deeply drunk in the book as I worked to grok it. And for books I read for fun, I got to spend more time enjoying them, living with the characters and author, by having it spread out over time.
As an adult it’s hard to preserve this. I read faster and read more than I did as a kid (I estimate I spend 4 hours a day reading on a typical day (books, blogs, forums, etc.), not including incidental reading in the course of doing other things). Even with my relatively slow reading rate of about 200 wpm, I can polish off ~50k words per day, the length of a short novel.
The trick, I find, is to read slowly by reading multiple things concurrently and reading only a little bit of each every day. For books this is easy: I can just limit myself to a single chapter per day. As long as I have 4 or 5 books I’m working on at once, I can spread out the reading of each to cover about a month. Add in other things like blogs and I can spread things out more.
I think this has additional benefits over just getting to spend more time with the ideas. It lets the ideas in each book come up against each other in ways they might otherwise not. I sometimes notice patterns that I might otherwise not have because things are made simultaneously salient that otherwise would not be. And as a result I think I understand what I read better because I get the chance not just to let it sink in over days but also because I get to let it sink in with other stuff that makes my memory of it richer and more connected.
So my advice, if you’re willing to try it, is to read multiple books, blogs, etc. concurrently, only reading a bit of each one each day, and let your reading span weeks and months so you can soak in what you read more deeply rather than letting it burn bright and fast through your mind to be forgotten like a used up candle.
Interesting idea, thanks. I think this also hints at other ways to approach this (i.e. maybe rather than interspersing books with other books, you could interspersing them with non-reading-things that still give you some chance to have idea from multiple domains bumping into each other)
tl;dr: read multiple things concurrently so you read them “slowly” over multiple days, weeks, months
When I was a kid, it took a long time to read a book. How could it not: I didn’t know all the words, my attention span was shorter, I was more restless, I got lost and had to reread more often, I got bored more easily, and I simply read fewer words per minute. One of the effects of this is that when I read a book I got to live with it for weeks or months as I worked through it.
I think reading like that has advantages. By living with a book for longer the ideas it contained had more opportunity to bump up against other things in my life. I had more time to think about what I had read when I wasn’t reading. I more deeply drunk in the book as I worked to grok it. And for books I read for fun, I got to spend more time enjoying them, living with the characters and author, by having it spread out over time.
As an adult it’s hard to preserve this. I read faster and read more than I did as a kid (I estimate I spend 4 hours a day reading on a typical day (books, blogs, forums, etc.), not including incidental reading in the course of doing other things). Even with my relatively slow reading rate of about 200 wpm, I can polish off ~50k words per day, the length of a short novel.
The trick, I find, is to read slowly by reading multiple things concurrently and reading only a little bit of each every day. For books this is easy: I can just limit myself to a single chapter per day. As long as I have 4 or 5 books I’m working on at once, I can spread out the reading of each to cover about a month. Add in other things like blogs and I can spread things out more.
I think this has additional benefits over just getting to spend more time with the ideas. It lets the ideas in each book come up against each other in ways they might otherwise not. I sometimes notice patterns that I might otherwise not have because things are made simultaneously salient that otherwise would not be. And as a result I think I understand what I read better because I get the chance not just to let it sink in over days but also because I get to let it sink in with other stuff that makes my memory of it richer and more connected.
So my advice, if you’re willing to try it, is to read multiple books, blogs, etc. concurrently, only reading a bit of each one each day, and let your reading span weeks and months so you can soak in what you read more deeply rather than letting it burn bright and fast through your mind to be forgotten like a used up candle.
Interesting idea, thanks. I think this also hints at other ways to approach this (i.e. maybe rather than interspersing books with other books, you could interspersing them with non-reading-things that still give you some chance to have idea from multiple domains bumping into each other)