Speed Readers and Slowpokes - Cathy Butler

Many of my friends are book people – writers, readers, teachers. I think of myself as a book person too, most of the time. After all, I’ve written a few, and I get paid to teach people about others. I'm even occasionally invited to come and talk about books, as I will be doing in exactly a week’s time, when (shameless plug) I take part in a tribute to the wonderful New Zealand writer, Margaret Mahy (1936-2012) in Cambridge. But at the back of it all there’s this dreadful feeling.

What if they find out I’m a fraud?

It’s worst around New Year. That’s the time when many book-bloggish friends like to list all the books they’ve read over the previous 52 weeks. Many have read a hundred books, or two hundred, or four hundred…

If I were to post such a list, it would contain maybe twenty-five books. Thirty at a pinch.

Now, that’s not the entirety of my reading, because I also read student essays, critical articles, newspapers and indeed blogs such as An Awfully Big Blog Adventure.  But then, my friends also read other things. Even being as generous to myself as I reasonably can, by my rough calculation I read less than half what many of my friends do.

I realise of course that many people read far less even than that, but mostly they don’t try to pass themselves off as professional book people. No such excuse for me.

It’s not because I’m off doing other things, either. I’m not studying car maintenance, or working with the homeless, or indulging in another bracing evening’s parkour. It’s simply that I’m a slow reader. Not dyslexic, just slow. Or rather, I’m not a fast reader. I’d rather put it that way round, because I think my reading speed is the normal and natural one. When I read a page silently, I do it slightly (but not much) faster than I would if I were reading out loud. That’s the speed Aristotle read at, and St Paul, and Virgil, and if it’s good enough for them it’s good enough for me.

Okay, I can’t be sure about that last bit, but there’s some – admittedly ambiguous – evidence that the usual way of reading in the ancient world was to mutter the words to oneself as one read, which must have put a natural limit on reading speed. (We can surmise this because when people were seen reading without moving their lips it was thought unusual enough to be worth mentioning, as St Augustine did of St Ambrose.)

So, when I read at the speed of speech (or just a bit faster) I’m not being odd, at least within a historical context. But I still envy my friends the ability to get through a book in a day that would take me a week to finish. I’d like to be able to say that they aren’t really absorbing it – that the windmills of my mind may grind words slowly but that they grind exceeding small, whereas my friends are not speeding but skimming. And it’s true that I remember what I’ve read pretty well; but then so do many of my speed-reading buddies – at least, in terms of characters and plot.

I’m still suspicious of their new-fangled minds, however. They may read adequately in terms of comprehension, but at double the speed do they really have time to take in the music of the language? To enjoy its taste, timbre and rhythm ? Isn’t it like playing an LP record at 78rpm; or bolting a meal at Le Gavroche in twenty minutes, or speeding up Gone with the Wind to get through it in less than two hours? (Actually, that last one sounds quite a good idea.) Do they read poetry at the same frantic rate? And if not, why whip prose along in this wild career?

I am forced to conclude with this salvo of rhetorical questions because I honestly don’t know the answer, never having read at speed myself.

But I bet there are ABBA readers who can tell me.