Slow Reading

I can read fast enough, I suppose, and often have to--not like my daughter or other naturally gifted speed readers, mind you, but fast enough. And as a young professional consuming stores of information, and a broadly interested reader, I learned early to skim the organization of a book or article, its key points, its thinking and conclusions. In the case of many books and articles, you can glean all that is of value in them in just that way. It has worked for me, not only to gather basic information fast, but also to identify those writings that deserved more time and attention, the ones with which I wanted to reward myself by spending more time with them.

With those more worthy or interesting writings, I've always preferred to read more slowly, to savor what's written and how it's written. I like to think about it all, too. And if it's particularly well written and engaging, I sometimes allow myself to stop and almost meditate on the method or the message. But this is not an approach to reading that will serve you particularly well in staying abreast of the fast breaking news and volumes of information daily produced in both print media and on-line. But it is still the best approach--the only approach--for truly enjoying and understanding the most important and entertaining things written.

So you can imagine my reflexive sense of empathy when, as I was skimming through article summaries at Arts & Letters Daily, I encountered an article from the UK daily, The Guardian, titled, "The Art of Slow Reading." And yes, I stopped to bring up the full article and read it carefully. Not a great piece of writing, I nonetheless found an interesting discussion of this new movement afoot, and a welcome affirmation of my own experience and views on the topic. From The Guardian:

If you're reading this article in print, chances are you'll only get through half of what I've written. And if you're reading this online, you might not even finish a fifth. At least, those are the two verdicts from a pair of recent research projects – respectively, the Poynter Institute's Eyetrack survey, and analysis by Jakob Nielsen – which both suggest that many of us no longer have the concentration to read articles through to their conclusion...

According to The Shallows, a new book by technology sage Nicholas Carr, our hyperactive online habits are damaging the mental faculties we need to process and understand lengthy textual information...Which all means that although, because of the internet, we have become very good at collecting a wide range of factual titbits, we are also gradually forgetting how to sit back, contemplate, and relate all these facts to each other. And so, as Carr writes, "we're losing our ability to strike a balance between those two very different states of mind. Mentally, we're in perpetual locomotion".

...But, a literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully...

"If you want the deep experience of a book, if you want to internalise it, to mix an author's ideas with your own and make it a more personal experience, you have to read it slowly," says Ottowa-based John Miedema, author of Slow Reading (2009).

But Lancelot R Fletcher, the first present-day author to popularise the term "slow reading", disagrees. He argues that slow reading is not so much about unleashing the reader's creativity, as uncovering the author's. "My intention was to counter postmodernism, to encourage the discovery of authorial content," the American expat explains from his holiday in the Caucasus mountains in eastern Europe. "

...Nicholas Carr's book elaborates further. "The words of the writer," suggests Carr, "act as a catalyst in the mind of the reader, inspiring new insights, associations, and perceptions, sometimes even epiphanies." And, perhaps even more significantly, it is only through slow reading that great literature can be cultivated in the future. As Carr writes, "the very existence of the attentive, critical reader provides the spur for the writer's work. It gives the author the confidence to explore new forms of expression, to blaze difficult and demanding paths of thought, to venture into uncharted and sometimes hazardous territory."

---"The Art of Slow Reading," The Guardian (7.15.10)

Works for me. Really does.