4 ms·

I realized that it was very tough for me to read the whole article from start to beginning, sentence by sentence, without getting distracted or skipping sentenc

I realized that it was very tough for me to read the whole article from start to beginning, sentence by sentence, without getting distracted or skipping sentences.

anigbrowl 12y ago
Well it's not exactly prose for the ages. A fluffy article like this is appropriate for speed reading. If it were an article about your professional specialty or something important like a firm in which you were invested, then you'd naturally be more interested and would read it more closely and carefully. If you were reading for pleasure you could have a similar dichotomy. I read a contemporary espionage thriller a few weeks ago and flew through it; it was enjoyable but quite predictably plotted and the characters unburdened by doubt, so reading the book was a simple matter of finding out how the hero arrived at the showdown and what he did when he got there (you'll no doubt be relieved to know that the free world was saved, once again). Then I read a literary novel with another novel embedded within in, and a lead character engaged in teaching literary criticism - quite a challenging book due to the near-constant tension between narrative and narrative purpose, with the latter becoming a key element of the former, via an imagined obscenity trial for the book-within-a-book. This was further complicated by the fact that I found most of the characters deeply unsympathetic...at first. As you can imagine, this one required a considerable degree of thought and reflection, and my reading speed varied considerably with the subject matter - and I anticipate it will influence my perception of other books going forward, so in that sense I'm still reading it despite having got to the end. Currently I'm reading a science-fiction book examining the psychological construction of identity, Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. And although I've read it twice already (having been into his work for some 30 years now), and although it's quite a short book, it's going to take weeks because of Lem's narrative density - he tells simple stories but with a deliberately unfiltered attention to detail which demands total mental attention. All are enjoyable, but all provide very different reading experiences and demand different things from the reader.

I realized that it was very tough for me to read the whole article from start to beginning, sentence by sentence, without getting distracted or skipping sentences.

anigbrowl 12y ago

Well it's not exactly prose for the ages. A fluffy article like this is appropriate for speed reading. If it were an article about your professional specialty or something important like a firm in which you were invested, then you'd naturally be more interested and would read it more closely and carefully. If you were reading for pleasure you could have a similar dichotomy. I read a contemporary espionage thriller a few weeks ago and flew through it; it was enjoyable but quite predictably plotted and the characters unburdened by doubt, so reading the book was a simple matter of finding out how the hero arrived at the showdown and what he did when he got there (you'll no doubt be relieved to know that the free world was saved, once again). Then I read a literary novel with another novel embedded within in, and a lead character engaged in teaching literary criticism - quite a challenging book due to the near-constant tension between narrative and narrative purpose, with the latter becoming a key element of the former, via an imagined obscenity trial for the book-within-a-book. This was further complicated by the fact that I found most of the characters deeply unsympathetic...at first. As you can imagine, this one required a considerable degree of thought and reflection, and my reading speed varied considerably with the subject matter - and I anticipate it will influence my perception of other books going forward, so in that sense I'm still reading it despite having got to the end. Currently I'm reading a science-fiction book examining the psychological construction of identity, Stanislaw Lem's Solaris. And although I've read it twice already (having been into his work for some 30 years now), and although it's quite a short book, it's going to take weeks because of Lem's narrative density - he tells simple stories but with a deliberately unfiltered attention to detail which demands total mental attention. All are enjoyable, but all provide very different reading experiences and demand different things from the reader.