I am a slow reader. As a writer, I relish the flavor of well-constructed sentences, intelligent metaphors and artful descriptions of characters and settings. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then show me the words that comprise that image and I will slowly devour them, study them, enjoy them. I frequently read sentences multiple times.
I also subvocalize. This is the process of hearing words in your head as you translate them from inkblots on a page into words with meaning. I believe the key to speed reading is to learn not to slow your intake to the speed at which those words are spoken, but rather to capture their meaning as a collection of letters represented as an image, like a frame in a motion picture. In theory one can then rapidly scan over a sentence and a page in very little time. I’ve tried this and failed. And I challenge anyone else to attempt it.
So, if you likely subvocalize, not only are you hearing my words right now as if I spoke them to you, but as Charles Dickens famously took his immortal place next to Scrooge and future readers, observing along with them the appearance of an unearthly spirit, “I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.”
So here we are.
Again, I am a slow reader. Prior to retirement I had little time available for reading. It seemed that something more necessary or easily digestible always got in the way of sitting down with a good book. But now, as Mr. Philby commented about George, inventor of the Time Machine as depicted by H.G. Wells, “I have all the time in the world.”
I have been searching through lists of the one hundred greatest books ever written. My goal is to read them, along with some lesser distractions I’ve come across, whether recommended by friends or gifted by family. There is a great deal of overlap in the “best of” lists. The first narrowing of my parameters was to focus on novels. A step further might be to choose from only American authors, but I’m not ready to limit myself in that way just yet.
This year I have slogged my way through Middlemarch by George Eliot, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, and most recently One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The latter caught my attention many years ago when I was in a similar literary mood. After college I found that I craved intellectual exercise come September each year. Perhaps it was the changing weather, fireside relaxation with a cozy blanket and a good book, or maybe it was a programmed impulse in the wake of a lifetime of school starting up at that time each year.
The net result of having inadequate time to dedicate to a given tome was a gap between reading sessions that had the effect of erasing what I’d read several days or a week earlier. In the case of “Solitude” it left me starting over, trying to memorize the relationships within six generations of a South American family whose male members were all either named Jose Arcadio or Aureliano. In one reproductive conflagration by a wandering military man, a trail of 17 Aurelianos was deposited across a war torn nation. I couldn’t keep track. I tried several times to read the book and then gave up. See the family tree on this page for a better sense of the challenge.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for literature in1982 "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts." He is said to have written in the style of his grandmother’s storytelling when he was a child. She would sit stone-faced and speak of fantasy and reality such that it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began.
I wanted to read fiction that was Nobel-worthy. It left me mentally weary, satisfied with my accomplishment for having finally completed my reading of it, and enriched in my world-view and whatever notion I had of the meaning of life. From what I’ve read of experiences with LSD, it is similarly colorful and mind-expanding.
And now, on to something completely different.