I’m a fast reader. I’ve always been a fast reader, ever since I learned to read, and went racing ahead of the rest of the class through the Village With Three Corners series. But lately I’ve been starting to think that maybe I read too fast.
I remember reading in bed when I was a kid. My mum would tell me I could read to the end of the next chapter, or whatever, and then I had to put out the light. But sometimes I would be so into the book that I would skim-read ahead of that, just to find out what was going to happen. Skim-reading is, of course, a very useful skill if you have a lot of academic reading to get through, but it’s not the best way to appreciate the finer points of a good novel. Sometimes I find that it’s easy to concentrate on the dialogue and the action and not to read the description too carefully, but I know that I miss out when I do that.
I realised to what extent this was the case recently, when talking to people who read much more slowly than me. Until then, if anything, I’d assumed I had the advantage over them. After all, I could get through so many more books than they could. And that, in turn, meant I was much more open to discovering new things – it’s easier to take a risk on a book you’re not sure about when you don’t feel it’s too big a time commitment to get through it.
However, a couple of people have mentioned to me that when they read, they hear all the voices in their heads, as though it were being read aloud to them. This was a revelation to me, as I do no such thing.
Language is an interesting thing – the letters and words represent sounds, which in turn represent objects or concepts in the real world. But when we read, our brains don’t have to do that whole process – we can look at a word we recognise and our brains can leap straight to the meaning without having to sound it out. Which is great, of course, or we’d all be struggling through everything with our lips moving. But I’m starting to think that if our brains rush through the process too fast we will miss out. Reading literature is not just about getting the meaning, but about the way that the language itself is crafted. For example, for me, I can appreciate poetry – which is all about the use of language and hardly about story at all – much better if it is read aloud than if I read it to myself.
I’ve started trying to consciously slow my reading pace down, but it’s not always easy – I suppose old habits are hard to break. However, I’m currently reading The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy, and those books are working wonders at turning me into a slow reader. McCarthy never rushes the pace – he describes long horseback journeys in such detail, and so fully and believably realises the passing landscapes, that they almost seem to be happening in real time. You get a real sense of the time and distance that everything takes. Long passages can pass without action and dialogue, and McCarthy can move seamlessly from description of setting, to the characters’ external thoughts, or to the sorts of philosophical musings that few modern writers could attempt without sounding trite.
Just one example of an extract where the writing stopped me in my tracks and made me read it again, just to appreciate it fully:
“Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightening glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.” (All the Pretty Horses)
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