Tag: Huckleberry Finn

General · reading

S is for Speed Reading

Sonia Lal21 Comments

columnfivemediainfographicsinfographicdesigncontI don’t speed read. I don’t want to speed read.

I read fast enough on my own. 75% faster than the national average, according to  the Staples test. It says I read 436 words per minute, about the level of a college graduate, which makes sense. 🙂 It makes me wonder about the rest of this country, too. LOL

It says if I maintained this speed, I could read War and Peace in 22 hours and 27 minutes. Which is fine. I could maintain it, as I read the piece in the test rather more slowly than usual because I knew there would be a test afterward. So I could probably read it even faster than that.

It’s just that I don’t want to read War and Peace. I read it once in high school (took about a week, reading a few hours everyday) and I am not ever reading it again.

It also says I can read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling in 2 hours and 56 minutes. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien in 18 hours and 18 minutes. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller in 6 hours and 40 minutes. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell in 3 hours and 24 minutes. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand in 11 hours and 55 minutes. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck in 6 hours and 29 minutes. Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper in 5 hours and 34 minutes. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens in 5 hours and 11 minutes. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain in 4 hours and 11 minutes. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee in 3 hours and 47 minutes. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells in 2 hours and 19 minutes.

See, the Harry Potter book takes only a day to read and I don’t actually want to finish books that fast. Especially if I like the book. If I dislike the book, well, the faster the better. (Sadly, my speed decreases when I dislike a book.)

I want to spend a few days with a book, you know? I want to spend hours lost in the world, in the characters. I don’t like it when a book ends too soon.

So . . . I hope I never have to learn speed reading. Too many books end too quickly as it is and I really don’t to speed up the process.

Do you feel like I do? That speed reading allows you to read a little bit too fast?

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