How do you do that? Are you hearing the words out loud in your head? Is every sentence being parsed? Or is it like touch typing where you're hitting just close enough to get meaning but not enough to go deep?
Also, what is light prose? Is it just something you don't care too much about extracting meaning from?
> How do you do that? Are you hearing the words out loud in your head? Is every sentence being parsed?
Yes, I still have an internal voice when I read (and when I touch type for that matter).
> Also, what is light prose? Is it just something you don't care too much about extracting meaning from?
- The words are familiar (a counterexample would be any work written in Elizabethan English, since I'll trip over archaic word meanings)
- The organization is such as to make for easy understanding what is happening. Some authors do the opposite as a literary device; highly non-linear works or an extremely unreliably narrator are counterexamples. This does not exclude allegory. Arthur Miller's The Cruicible is a straightforward dramatization of a story in colonial Salem, but is rather transparently an allegory for McCarthyism.
I think that extracting meaning is largely orthogonal to whether prose is light or not. Certainly many important works are intentionally dense, but there's also overly pretentious drivel dressed up in hard-to-understand clothing.
One of the interesting things I've found in picking up a few languages is that listening to a foreign language is quite different from reading one.
When listening, especially to a recording (that is, you can't simply ask someone to repeat themselves, though you can usually replay a passage), when I hear a word I don't immediately recognise or am unfamiliar with ... my mind just sort of skips over it. Often I have some idea of meaning (previous encounters, or more often, context), even if that's vague. When reading, however, strange words cause me to stumble and I'll slow considerably. Consequence is that I can listen faster than I can read.
The dual option of listening and reading simultaneously is particularly effective, and I'm fond of options (often podcasts) which offer both audio and text transcripts to read along. This also seems to be more useful for expanding my language skills.
Also, what is light prose? Is it just something you don't care too much about extracting meaning from?