Reading quickly v. reading slow
I've always been a quick reader. I churn through books, barely able to wait to finish a sentence to turn the page. I don't stop once I start, it doesn't matter if I read through dinner and into the wee hours of the night, waking up groggy but satisfied the next morning. I annoy the family because once I have my nose in a book, I am deaf to questions, pleas, requests for dinner. And my daughter is exactly the same. She's eleven now and to keep her in books in an impossible task. The longer the series, the thicker the book, the greater the rate of acceleration.
My son, who is eight, on the other hand plods slowly through a book. So much so, 'tiger mother' that I am, I panic that he's not going to read 'enough' if he proceeds so slowly, his vocabulary won't expand and his imagination isn't being fired by the book in his hand.
Until I sat down with him recently when he was reading. I watched him for a while and it took him an age to turn the page of the book, Five Run Away Together. So I asked him what he was thinking about as he was reading ...
It turns out he was wondering what it would be like to own a boat and whether he would have to make sure he could swim well first in case of an accident, whether islands were actually scary in real life because there might be 'savage beasts' there like crocodiles. He wasn't sure why George wanted to be a boy but he was envious that she had a dog. He'd thought to himself that if he had a dog, he'd like one like that but he hoped it would come when it was called and play with him a lot. He wasn't sure whether to have a small one or a big one, but definitely a fluffy one. He felt sorry for the boy Edgar because his parents were mean and maybe he would have been a nice kid if only they had been nice too. He thought he might have done things differently when they found the cave, maybe not stayed there the whole time but just come for a while each day. Etc, etc, etc.
No wonder it takes him an age to turn a page!
So - it turns out that there are different ways to enjoy a book and now I feel that I've not always gotten everything I could out of them because, unlike Spencer, I have never substituted my imagination for the author's. Live and learn!
My son, who is eight, on the other hand plods slowly through a book. So much so, 'tiger mother' that I am, I panic that he's not going to read 'enough' if he proceeds so slowly, his vocabulary won't expand and his imagination isn't being fired by the book in his hand.
Until I sat down with him recently when he was reading. I watched him for a while and it took him an age to turn the page of the book, Five Run Away Together. So I asked him what he was thinking about as he was reading ...
It turns out he was wondering what it would be like to own a boat and whether he would have to make sure he could swim well first in case of an accident, whether islands were actually scary in real life because there might be 'savage beasts' there like crocodiles. He wasn't sure why George wanted to be a boy but he was envious that she had a dog. He'd thought to himself that if he had a dog, he'd like one like that but he hoped it would come when it was called and play with him a lot. He wasn't sure whether to have a small one or a big one, but definitely a fluffy one. He felt sorry for the boy Edgar because his parents were mean and maybe he would have been a nice kid if only they had been nice too. He thought he might have done things differently when they found the cave, maybe not stayed there the whole time but just come for a while each day. Etc, etc, etc.
No wonder it takes him an age to turn a page!
So - it turns out that there are different ways to enjoy a book and now I feel that I've not always gotten everything I could out of them because, unlike Spencer, I have never substituted my imagination for the author's. Live and learn!
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Amador
(new)
Apr 29, 2013 06:30PM
I have a Malaysian Chinese friend who reads 800 page novels in a day, I think she is like you, she is able to get all the information without having to read every word.. I am also a voracious reader, and can read fast or slow, depending on what I am reading, if I enjoy the character I am reading, I slow down and, inside my head, recreate the scene in my imagination in real time, I can hear him or her in his/her own voice and I can see what the character sees, the scene, the furniture, the river, etc... If I don't enjoy the character (or the scene) so much I speed up, jump lines and just peruse the key words until I reach a passage which I will enjoy recreating inside my head again.. It is the way I enjoy reading fiction...it is interesting that reading can have such a different meaning for each person.
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Amador wrote: "I have a Malaysian Chinese friend who reads 800 page novels in a day, I think she is like you, she is able to get all the information without having to read every word.. I am also a voracious reade..."Me too. Sometimes I enjoy the word play by author. But I tend to skip para that have loads of numbers. For example "escape from paradise : from third world to first" by john harding. I skipped the financial figures part.
I just attended a 2-days Speed Reading program in February this year and it helps me a lot. My speed rate had improved by more than 70% after the class
I can never keep track of what and how much I am reading. In fact, I like to think of my reading as meandering at a trot (if there is such a thing). Sometimes I read two books simultaneously (not parallel but asynchronously) and opening the book, goes to the exact page I was reading when I dropped it. Other books can be more difficult - such as Shankar Ramamurthi's Principles of Quantum Physics - the more I read the more I flip back to figure out "What the.... happened here?" Shaminis books on the other hand are to be enjoyed like wine, slowly, page by page, until you reach the climax. I have read her books through lunch, dinner, the washroom, travelling in the SMRT, the plane, the lounge. EVERYWHERE - they are just..... UNPUTDOWNABLE!
