On Slow Reading
For most of my twenties I measured reading by volume. I kept a list, counted titles at year's end, and felt the quiet satisfaction of a number going up. Somewhere along the way I noticed that 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 highlight but to argue in the margins. A good marginal note is a small act of thinking out loud: is this true? compared to what? then why does the other thing happen? The page becomes a conversation rather than a broadcast.
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 — to skim, to summarize, to move on. There's a place for that. There is also a place for staying.
I've stopped trying to finish 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