I speed read War and Peace for the first time in ~4 hours for the school test (I refused to read assigned literature). It went into one ear and into another.
I then re-read it while recovering from the surgery over a leisurely week and enjoyed it tremendously as I think would anyone who gives it time.
My mother told me she read just the Peace parts, while my father admitted to reading only the War parts (they are pretty much alternate chapters).
Assigned reading has a bad habit of pushing us into such patterns. Human's seem to treat anything they are asked to do as a cost to be minimized in favor of the things they choose to do. Given options, they will do the things least similar to those that they are asked to do.
It's too bad we can't structure assigned reading and coursework in terms of choice, I distinctly remember choosing to work on harder assignments when given choices back in the grade school era.
I’ve heard people say they’d done similar things (about skipping the battle scenes) and I don’t get it. Some really important things happen to some of the characters in those bits! Surely it’d be super confusing…
To be honest, the whole book is confusing even if you read it as written. It's probably me reading it over months, but forgetting names and relations does not help. So, probably skipping some chapters wouldn't matter to me that much. In general, I love the book. I definitely need to finish it!
There was a time I wanted to learn Russian to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
I believe you could consume all the words in Moby Dick in 16 hours. But it’s one of those “crammed full of metaphors” books that could easily take a seminar to unpack. I don’t pretend to get it, but smarter people than me write articles on its layers of complexity and interpretation[1].
You can read those masterworks at a superficial level and they’re usually somewhat rewarding. Or you can read Dostoyevsky while deep diving on Russian history and get a notably different experience. But it takes a lot longer.
I generally read audiobooks at 1.5x because 1.0 seems terribly slow to me. This more or less matches my reading pace for printed books, so 16 hours seems right.
Not everyone is native English speaker, and slow pace allows you to get immersed. That people want 1,5 speed or do two things at same time is a sign of our time (appropriate content is cheap snd widely available but we don't have more available leisure time). Society doesn't want people have abundant leisure time, hence 'Bullshit Jobs'.
I'm not a native English speaker either. The thing here is that audiobooks are quite a bit slower than normal speech, which is what we've been trained on all our lives.
People want 1.5 speed because that's what gets the narrator back to a normal speaking speed.
I slow down some narrators and speed up others because I like content delivered at a specific speed. Leisure time is a reason, but not the only reason.
