On Slow Reading
For most of my twenties I measured reading by volume. A list at the start of the year, a count at the end, and the quiet satisfaction of watching a number climb. Somewhere along the way I noticed I could remember the count but not the books.
Slow reading started as an accident. I was stuck on a difficult chapter and, out of stubbornness rather than virtue, I read it three times. The first pass I understood the words. The second, the argument. The third, I began to disagree with it — and disagreement, it turns out, is a kind of attention you can't fake.
Now I read fewer things on purpose. I keep a pencil in the book, not to underline but to argue in the margins: is this true? compared to what? then why does the other thing happen? The page becomes a conversation rather than a broadcast.
I do most of this in the upstairs bookshops in Mong Kok — up a narrow staircase, air conditioning that never quite wins, books stacked to the ceiling, the owner reading his own book behind the register and showing no interest in serving you. That absence of attention is itself a reading condition. The Central Library in Causeway Bay works the same way. The best thing there isn't the collection; it's that nobody expects you to produce anything within the half hour.
Slowness is not the goal. Understanding is. But understanding has a speed limit, and most of the tools around us are designed to help us exceed it — skim, summarise, move on. There's a place for that. There is also a place for staying.
I've stopped forcing my way through books that aren't worth rereading. If a book is only good enough to read once, quickly, I'm not sure it was good enough to read at all. That sounds harsh. What I mean is gentler: the books that matter, matter slowly, and they'll wait for you to catch up.
Back to writing