Reading slowly, on purpose

Four years ago I read sixty books in a year and kept a spreadsheet to prove it. Last year I read twenty-two. I can tell you something specific about every one of the twenty-two. About the sixty, I can tell you that I was proud.

The spreadsheet had a column for date finished, a column for rating, and a column I called “takeaway,” which I filled in with a single sentence while the book was still warm. Reading those sentences now is like looking through someone else’s holiday photos. They are accurate and they do not help.

What changed

Nothing dramatic. I stopped treating a book as a unit of work that has to be completed on a schedule. I started treating it as a place I was visiting, where staying an extra week was allowed.

Here is the method, because someone will ask.

1. Read a chapter, then stop, even if you want to continue. Wanting to continue is the point.
2. Do not take notes during the chapter. Take them right after, from memory, in the notebook.
3. Check the notes against the page. The gaps are the interesting part.
4. Wait a day before starting the next chapter.¹
5. When a book stops pulling, put it down without ceremony. No guilt, no review.

1 Not always a literal day. Sometimes it is an afternoon with the book face down on the arm of the chair, which counts if you do not pick it back up.

Step four is the one people resist. A day is a long time. But the day is where the chapter settles. I have caught myself on a walk realising what an author meant two paragraphs after I had decided they were wrong.¹

An example

Last spring I spent six weeks on a novel of about 340 pages. By the old rules, that is a failure of pace. I read about eight pages a day, some days none.

On day nineteen I noticed that I had been misreading a minor character the whole time. I had her down as cold. Reading again, after the pause, I saw she was just careful, and the care was the whole book. If I had finished in a weekend, I would have told people it was fine and a bit slow.

I do not want to oversell this. There are books that deserve a fast read, and there are books that should be abandoned at page forty. Slow reading is not a virtue. It is a tool, and like most tools it is good at one thing and tedious at the rest.²

2 This is the third time I have tried to write a sentence defending slow reading without sounding smug. I am leaving this one in as a record of my failure.

What I do with the notes

The notes from memory are short, usually four or five lines. I write them in the notebook, in whatever order they come, and I do not tidy them. If I remember the ending of the chapter first, that goes first.

Once a month I read through them in one sitting. This takes about forty minutes and is the closest thing I have to a book club, the other member being a slightly younger version of me who had opinions. We disagree more than I would have guessed. I find this useful, in the way it is useful to be corrected by a person who cannot hear your reply.

Highlighters, since you ask

I do not underline in books I own anymore, and I did for twenty years. What I do now is stranger: I read with a pencil in my hand and only use it once per chapter. One mark. If I have to choose, I have to decide what mattered.

One mark per chapter is a surprisingly hard rule. The first chapter, I made eleven marks and then erased ten. By the fourth chapter, I could usually tell as I read which sentence would be the one. That is not a skill I had before.

I will add one more thing that I did not expect: the books I read slowly are the ones my friends now ask me about. I seem to have become a person with opinions, which is a mild embarrassment.

The cost, again

I read fewer books, and that is a real loss. There are good books I will never get to. I try not to think about this too much, because a reader who is anxious about the books they have not read tends to be bad at the book in their hands.

The pile on my night table is currently seven books high. It is not a to do list. It is a pile.